Many roses are aptly named for their striking colour, bewitching scent, or in honour of the breeder of their variety. However, roses are occasionally named for a singular event, an intriguing affiliation, or an irresistible character, and these invariably come with a story. Tales of mystery, heroics, and invention often accompany some of our favourite roses, and this series of articles,’ The Stories Behind the Stems’, will endeavour to relate some of the most interesting.
Rosa Omar Khayyam
Some roses arrive with pedigrees; others arrive with prophecies. The Damask rose known as ‘Rosa Omar Khayyam’ carries both—its name bound not merely to a man, but to a verse, a translation, a grave, and the quiet fall of blossoms across centuries.
Omar Khayyam, who died in 1131, was a polymath of rare breadth: mathematician, astronomer, philosopher, and poet. In the West he is best known for the Rubáiyát—a collection of quatrains whose meditations on faith, doubt, joy, and mortality resonated deeply when they emerged into Victorian consciousness. Roses recur throughout these verses as symbols, their beauty poised against time’s inevitability. Khayyam himself is said to have predicted his resting place would be “where flowers in the springtime would shed their petals over his dust.” When his pupil Nizami Aruzi later visited Khayyam’s grave in Nishapur, Persia, pear and peach blossoms had indeed fallen to carpet it.
Over time, the site evolved—from the Cemetery of Hayrah into part of a saint’s shrine, and then a formal Persian garden. In 1934, Reza Shah commissioned a reconstruction, erecting a white marble monument that remained deliberately open to the surrounding garden, so that blossoms might still find their way to Khayyam’s grave. The current mausoleum, completed in 1963, stands today as a symbol of Nishapur and of contemporary Iranian architecture.
It was near this tomb, in 1886, that the rose’s journey westward began. British artist and war correspondent William Simpson, a member of the Omar Khayyam Society, visited Nishapur and gathered three rose hips from near the poet’s grave. Upon returning to England, he gave them to Bernard Quaritch, the publisher who had issued Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of the Rubáiyát. Cultivated at Kew, the rose was eventually planted beside FitzGerald’s own grave in Suffolk.
FitzGerald—born Edward Purcell in Suffolk before taking his mother’s family name due to several significant bequests—was a quiet poet with eminent friends such as Tennyson and Thackeray, whom he had met studying at Cambridge. Later in life, he studied Persian literature and language. His friend Edward Cowell, while cataloguing manuscripts at the Bodleian, found several verses attributed to Omar Khayyam, and sent them to FitzGerald. Cowell then travelled to Calcutta, and there discovered another group of Khayyam’s writings, that he immediately sent to his friend back in England. From these varied sources, all of which were recorded after Khayyam’s passing, FitzGerald produced his famously free translation of the Rubaiyat, first published in 1859.
Initially unnoticed, the work was later taken up by figures such as Rossetti and his Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood compatriots. Gradually, the selection of poetry that Fitzgerald transmogrified became celebrated—its lyrical elegance and interpretive freedom allowing it to be embraced as both English and Persian literature. FitzGerald became best known not for his original poetry, but for these translations, which preserved the spirit rather than the literal structure of the originals. He believed that to translate exactly from Persian to English, lost the essence of the genius he found in Khayyam’s words. Instead, his work retained the elegance and poignance of its subject, although is often thought by purists to be as much his invention as Khayyam’s. In this way, poet and translator amplified one another’s legacy, becoming perhaps permanently entwined.
The rose named for Khayyam was officially registered in 1894, although it had been around for perhaps hundreds of years before. On 7 October 1893, members of the Omar Khayyam Society planted it on FitzGerald’s grave at St Michael’s Church in Boulge, Suffolk—a final symbolic linking of poet, translator, and flower. It is purported to be growing there still.
Botanically, ‘Rosa Omar Khayyam’ is a small, dense Damask shrub, growing 2 to 3 feet tall and wide. Its sage green foliage is well armed with prickles and the ocassional thorn. The flowers are clear, light pink, double blooms, with a quartered form. They have the classic button eye of the Damasks, as well as their enchanting old world, damask fragrance. Measuring about two inches across, each bloom carries 26 to 40 petals, and blooms once per season, bearing its flowers in clusters of three to four. Hardy from Zone 4b through 9b, it is a rose of restraint rather than excess—brief, fragrant, and memorable.
Like the verses that inspired its name, this rose does not deny the loss of a petal, or the certainty of the passage of time. Instead, it answers them with beauty. Khayyam’s poetry—sometimes read as hedonistic, sometimes as philosophical—draws on traditions that acknowledge Zurvanic determinism while urging delight in the present moment. Savour life while it is given without despair for the future. Surely, that is a lesson all lovers of roses will have learned long ago. With ‘Rosa Omar Khayyam’, petals fall as they always have: onto memorials, into gardens, across history. In that gentle act, a rose becomes an ancient line of verse still blooming.
