There is a seductively romantic quality to the name The Wars of the Roses. It sounds less like a series of brutal dynastic civil wars and more like a heated disagreement between rival gardening clubs. The moniker conjures images of knights in shining armor politely plucking flowers in a temple garden, choosing their allegiance with a stem of crimson or cream. It suggests a conflict fought with a certain aesthetic elegance.
The reality, of course, was far grimmer, far muddier, and significantly less floral.
While the white rose of York and the red rose of Lancaster have become the defining visual shorthand for this thirty-year struggle for the English throne, they were not the primary symbols flying above the battlefields of the fifteenth century. If you were a soldier shivering in the mud, you would not have been scanning the fog for a rose to tell friend from foe. You would have been looking for the white boar of Richard III, a symbol of ferocity, or the red dragon of Cadwaladr, the fierce beast Henry Tudor raised to emphasize his ancient Welsh lineage.
This isn’t to say the flowers were absent. They appeared on livery badges, were carved into stone, and worn in courtly contexts, serving as quiet assertions of identity. But they were part of a crowded visual language, sharing space with fetterlocks, suns, and swans. It was later chroniclers—and ultimately William Shakespeare—who took these subtle emblems and sharpened the myth, canonizing the roses as the central antagonists of the drama.
However, we should not discard the flowers entirely, for they offer a fascinating intersection of history and horticulture. To the botanical pedant, the Red Rose of Lancaster is widely accepted to be Rosa gallica officinalis, also known as the Apothecary’s Rose. It is a stunning flower, to be sure, but it is not the blood-red hybrid tea rose we buy for Valentine’s Day. It is a deep, rich pink—the closest nature could get to red in the medieval European garden. It is an ancient variety, once valued as much for its medicinal properties as its beauty, blooming once a year with a heady, spicy fragrance.
On the other side of the dynastic divide stood the White Rose of York, commonly identified as Rosa alba semi-plena. Unlike its Gallica rival, the Alba rose is a scraggly, robust shrub that can thrive in the greyest of English weather. The flower is a pure, milky white with a golden center, possessing a refinement that belies the hardiness of the plant. If one were to assign personalities to plants, the Alba is the survivor, lurking in old churchyards long after the stone has crumbled.
These botanical emblems served as the bookends to a conflict that tore England apart from 1455 to 1485. It was a war of cousins, a grand family feud turned national catastrophe. The crown passed back and forth like a hot coal between the descendants of Edward III, scorching everyone who touched it. While the Battle of Bosworth Field is the famous finale, the war was a slow burn of instability. It featured horrific clashes like the Battle of Towton in 1461, fought in a blinding snowstorm, which is often cited as the bloodiest single day in English history. Men drowned in rivers of their own blood, snow turning red around them, fighting for kings who were often as much pawns as they were players.
And then, finally, came Bosworth.
August 22, 1485. This was the symbolic death knell of the Middle Ages in England. Richard III, the last Yorkist king, rode out to meet the challenger, Henry Tudor. Despite the villainous caricature later painted by Tudor historians, Richard fought with immense bravery. He led a cavalry charge directly at Henry, seeking to end the war with a single stroke. He failed. He was unhorsed, surrounded, and hacked to death, becoming the last English king to die in battle.
For centuries, the location of Richard’s body was a mystery, a footnote in history books that said he was buried with little ceremony in a friary that was later dissolved. It took until 2012 for the story to take its most surreal turn. Archaeologists, following a hunch and old maps, cut into the tarmac of a municipal parking lot in Leicester. There, beneath the reserved paint of a council parking bay, they found him. The skeleton with the curved spine, the skull cleaved by a halberd, proving that history is often literally beneath our feet, waiting for us to stop parking cars on top of it.
With Richard dead and Henry VII crowned, the fighting stopped, but the propaganda began. Henry needed to unify a fractured nation. He was a Lancastrian by loose claim, and he married Elizabeth of York to seal the peace. To visualize this union, the Tudor Rose was invented.
This is where art leaves horticulture behind entirely. The Tudor Rose is a graphic design masterclass: the white rose of York superimposed onto the red rose of Lancaster. It is a biological impossibility, a franken-flower that exists only in stone carvings, stained glass, and pub signs. It signaled that the two warring houses were now one. There was no more York or Lancaster, only Tudor.
Humans, however, have a deep-seated need to see their stories reflected in the natural world. We want the myth to be tangible. Because of this, folklore has long pointed to Rosa damascena ‘York and Lancaster’. It is a beautiful Damask rose that produces blooms that are blush pink, or white splashed with pink, or sometimes half-white and half-pink. While it wasn’t bred to prove a political point, its chaotic mix of colors allowed storytellers to point to it and say, “Look, there is the peace of the realm in a single bloom.” It is not the neat, concentric layering of the heraldic badge, but a messy, beautiful botanical accident that we have drafted into service to keep the story alive.
Jason is the owner of Fraser Valley Rose Farm, a nursery in British Columbia specializing in roses and perennials. Through his YouTube channel and website, he shares practical advice on gardening and plant propagation, helping gardeners grow thriving plants and better understand rose care.
