The Rose Book | Kristine Paulus
Suzy Chase: When two podcasts collide, magic happens. Welcome to Dinner Party, the podcast where I bring together my two hit shows, Cookery by the Book and Decorating by the Book around here. We're all about cooking, sharing stories behind recipes, and creating a cozy home. I'm your host, Susie Chase, a West Village wife, mom and home cook. Inspired by Martha Stewart trying to live in a Nora Ephron movie, surrounded by toile, plaid, cookbooks, decorating books and magazines, cooking in my galley kitchen and living my best life in my darling New York City apartment in the cutest neighborhood in the city, the West Village. So come hang out and let's get into the show.
Kristine Paulus: Hi, I am Kristine Paulus, and I am here to talk about The Rose Book, which has just been published by Phaidon Press.
Suzy Chase: So Khristine, tell me about your position as the collection development librarian at the LuEsther
Kristine Paulus: LuEsther. That's correct.
Suzy Chase: LuEsther T. Mertz Library at the New York Botanical Garden. So how do you go about selecting and preserving botanical literature for the collection?
Kristine Paulus: I realize I always sound like I'm bragging when I describe what I do, but I might just have the best job in the world because I get paid to shop for books, which would be amazing enough, but I get to buy books about plants. So it's pretty easy because I'm a plant person and I'm basically just buying book that I want to buy for myself, but I get to share them with the world and that's one of the best parts. I love providing information for people, so I'm always looking at book reviews. I read a ton of book reviews. I look at publishers catalogs, and I follow on social media, the writers, gardeners and garden designers that I like and who are often the ones producing these books. So I'm usually on top of the new books that are coming out. Ultimately, the books that I select are decisions that are driven by the work that NYBG scientists and Horticulturists and other staff do. The library exists to support this work, whether it's describing new species or conserving endangered ones or teaching the next generation of botanists, gardeners, botanical illustrators, floral designers, or perhaps planning the next big exhibition. And then once I select the books, I purchase them. And then I see that our catalogers describe them in our database, which makes them searchable for our researchers.
Suzy Chase: Could you just give a very, very short history of the rose?
Kristine Paulus: Roses have a long and colorful history, but fossils discovered in Colorado show that they existed at least 35 million years ago, and the cultivation of them began around 5,000 years ago, most likely in China through the crossbreeding of wild rose varieties. During the Roman period, roses were grown extensively in the Middle East and used for all sorts of things. Roman nobility established public rose gardens, and then after the Roman Empire Bell, the popularity of roses ebbed and flowed depending on gardening trends of the time. They featured heavily in Greek and Roman mythology. 19th century rose's increased in popularity thanks to Napoleon's wife Josephine, who established a rose garden at Chateau de Maison, and this became the setting for Pierre Joseph Redouté 1824 watercolor collection Rose, which is still considered one of the finest records of botanical illustration.
Suzy Chase: What do you think makes roses more popular than any other flower?
Kristine Paulus: For one, it's their pleasing fragrance. Many roses tend to smell really good to us. They evoke strong emotions and memories, and they could be a real mood changer. Many of us enjoy using fragrances in our homes and in our bodies, and we like to stop to smell the flowers. It's a really important part of human culture. We know that Coco Chanel's famous perfume, Chanel number five, which is first released in 1921, uses roses. The Rose book includes a wonderful 2018 photograph by Turkish photographer Pari Dukovic might be mispronouncing his name taken for New Yorker, which ran a great article about picker's harvesting Centifolia roses for this purpose, they're so beautiful that we forgive them for their thorns. Amy De La Hayes essay, Roses in Fashion describes their wonderful wearable history, and there are lots of beautiful examples in the Rose Book. We also like the way they taste, they're used and cuisine. I recently had a rose flavored Turkish delight that one of my coworkers brought in, and it was absolutely delicious. So we really do eat, drink, and breathe them and also wear them.
Suzy Chase: You wrote in the foreword Roses are so adored that they represent love. Is it any coincidence that the word rose is an anagram of aeros? So talk a little bit about the connection between roses and love.
Kristine Paulus: Yeah, roses have long been a symbol of love and affection, passion and romance, largely thanks to Greek mythology. Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty, gave the rose its name in honor of her son, ERO. She simply rearranged the word by one letter again. In Roman mythology, the rose represented Venus, the goddess of love, and they were perpetuated in the popular Victorian art of flu, AKA, the language of flowers where meanings are ascribed to different flowers, roses of different colors have different meanings, but in general, the rose tends to symbolize love. Shane Connolly's essay in the book, the Language of the Rose goes into this a lot further.
Suzy Chase: You also wrote with incredible diversity of for color, there is a rose for every person and every purpose. I love that so much. So what are a couple of your favorite unique rose varieties?
Kristine Paulus: I tend to really like purple roses because I like roses and I like purple, and you don't see purple roses as often in the Peggy Rockefeller Rose Garden at NYBG, there's a cult of our called Poseidon, which has really beautiful cupped blossoms and lavender petals. I fall in love with it every time I see it. I also tend to roses that have two-tone petals. There's a cult of our called garden delight that is sort of an ombre of colors. And then we have this really cool stripe rose called Camille Pesaro. It's very, very striking. I also really like green flowers and I don't think they get enough attention. There's a rose called Rosa Reta barreta flora, and it can easily go unnoticed in a garden because it's camouflaged by its small green flowers. But I think it's so pretty in my own garden at home, I just like ones that are easy to grow
Suzy Chase: With the purple rose, is the scent different, than let's say a red rose?
Kristine Paulus: There are many different scents in roses, and I can't actually recall what Poseidon smells like. And there are a lot of roses who, especially cultivated roses. The ones that we tend to see in our gardens today aren't always as fragrant because they're br for disease resistance or long blooming periods. So they may not be as fragrant, but there are lots of different fragrances. But I couldn't tell you about Poseidon.
Suzy Chase: Perhaps one of the most evocative uses of the rose in music is as the symbol for the Ultimate Jam band, the Grateful Dead you wrote in the book. What is your favorite way Roses have been used as symbols in modern pop culture?
Kristine Paulus: I am a big Alfred Hitchcock fan, so I love his use of roses as a recurring motif in his 1958 film, vertigo, she's a masterpiece of 20th century cinema movie stars, Kim Novak and Jimmy Stewart and flowers appear frequently throughout the film and the roses, especially symbolic in enigmatic. Early in the movie, there's a scene that shows Madeline, the character played by Kim Novak. She's buying a bouquet of roses in a flower shop. She takes the bouquet with her to an art museum where she sits looking at a painting of a woman holding the same bouquet that bouquet reappear throughout the film. Later she's seen fucking pedals and tossing them off the Golden Gate bridge into the bay before she leaps off the bridge. But she's rescued by the character portrayed by Jimmy Stewart. The Roses represent idealized and her fragile perfection, and I hope this isn't too much of a spoiler if you haven't seen it, but bouquet later is shattered mirroring her tragic fate. It's a fantastic film and there's a film still that's included in the book
Suzy Chase: Today. Almost infinite new varieties are being developed by hybridizer hard word to say in the constant quest for the perfect rose. So are you involved in the quest for the perfect rose and what would that perfect rose look like to you?
Kristine Paulus: Fortunately, I'm not involved in that quest and I might have different ideas about what's considered perfect, but I think today most people's idea of a perfect rose would have to be a variety that is disease resistant. Roses tend to attract a lot of pests and diseases. I don't want to sound like an advertisement for David Austin roses or anything, but one of the many wonderful attributes of his roses is that they are exceptionally disease resistant. And I know I love to garden, but I don't have as much time as I would like, so I'd rather not spend it battling diseases and puss of which there are many. My garden faces a busy New York City sidewalk. Therefore, it's a bit of what gardeners call hell strip dealing with ice melts and dogs and kids playing ball. So the roses that are there were all planted before my time and I don't know what they are. They're a classic red rows and they bloom all summer long and into the fall. I don't have to water them or prune them. I don't have to stake 'em. They just live and they're just absolutely perfect.
Suzy Chase: My favorite section of the book is called Rose: The Works, where it's different examples of the rose and art. I love the Irving Penn rose Blue Moon from 1970 of just an individual bloom. Could you chat a little bit about this?
Kristine Paulus: It shows a single stem and it shows the flower from behind rather than its face. It's an unusual perspective and it's not a representation of ideal beauty, which roses are often used for. The petals are starting to fade. They're changing from pink to brown and they're slightly shriveled, but there's beauty in that too. So I really like that it's saying that there's beauty in the natural process of decay. Penn was known for his fashion photography, and in particular his work for Vogue Magazine and this portrait of the Rose. It really is a portrait. It also feels like it's a portrait of a person. Maybe it's a portrait of one of his fashion models. It has a very figurative feel and it further seems to be saying that something doesn't have to be new or young or fresh to still be beautiful. I like to think that it says getting older is beautiful, but perhaps I'm reading a little too much into this for personal reasons.
Suzy Chase: Same, 50 plus is gorgeous if you ask.
Kristine Paulus: Me, right, it's new 25.
Suzy Chase: It is just getting better and better. I love that so much and I love that it's not, as you said, it's not perfection,
Kristine Paulus: Right? There's no such thing as perfection.
Suzy Chase: Where can we find you on the web and social media?
Kristine Paulus: I am on Instagram as flower scribbler, and I recently joined Blue Sky, but I haven't posted much yet. But my handle is Kristine Paulus. The New York Botanical Garden is located in the Bronx, conveniently next to the Metro North Station of the same name. It's located by the Bronx Zoo. Our neighbor Fordham University is right across the street. It's NYBG's. Instagram account is simply NYBG.
Suzy Chase: If you love roses and you want to know everything about the Rose, this book is for you. Thanks so much, Krristine, for coming on the show. Thanks for having me. This has been a pleasure. Okay, so where can you listen to the new Dinner Party podcast series? Well, it's on substack Suzy Chase.substack.com. You can also subscribe to Dinner Party for free on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Additionally, the episodes will be available on both Decorating by the Book and Cookery by the Book. Long story short, you'll be able to listen to it virtually everywhere. Thanks for listening. Bye.
