In our last look at the history of roses we described the roots of Valentine’s Day and how it moved from a celebration of Christian martyrs to a secular holiday celebrating love.

Now we’ll see how a beloved holiday flower came to be associated with Valentine’s as the celebration grew to become the event we recognize today.

Valentine’s Day Symbols

As St. Valentine’s Day became an increasingly popular holiday throughout Europe and the New World, commercial opportunities began to arise. Starting in the late 18th century and hitting its stride in the 19th, Valentine’s cards, flowers and candy became common holiday gifts.

One of the largest markets was in greeting cards. The greeting card industry became one of the most profitable sectors of Valentine’s related business and, its use of roses as a central image involved with love became intimiately connected with common holiday symbols. The poetry that was often made a central aspect of these cards was largely responsible for how modern thoughts regarding the holiday came about and, in this, we can see how heavily involved roses have always been.

Roses and Love

As we described before, roses have always been associated with the emotion of love in many Western cultural traditions. This type of symbolism continued forward as Valentine’s became a profitable holiday that embedded itself in annual celebrations. As far back as Edmund Spenser’s epic poem The Faerie Queene (published in 1590), roses have been mentioned in connection with the burgeoning holiday.

A 1784 collection of nursery rhymes (Gammer Gurton’s Garland) contained the archetypal Valentine’s Day love poem (one that should sound familiar to many readers) and uses the rose as a central image:

The rose is red, the violet’s blue
The honey’s sweet, and so are you
Thou are my love and I am thine
I drew thee to my Valentine
The lot was cast and then I drew
And Fortune said it shou’d be you.

This poem encapsulates the intimate connection between roses, Valentine’s Day and love — a connection that continues to exist today.

In part three of our history of roses we left off by detailing how Roses became an important flower for early Christians and, ultimately, for nations across most of Europe. Now we want to pick up the thread by seeing how a blossom of cultural and religious significance became adopted as part of Valentine’s Day tradition and eventually emerged as one of the most recognizable holiday flowers.

The Birth of Valentine’s Day

To understand how the rose became so important it’s necessary to first look at the birth of Valentine’s Day.

Saint Valentine’s Day came about in remembrance of two Christian saints (Valentine of Rome and Valentine of Terni) and of religious martyrs in general (as they were commonly named Valentine). In the 14th century, romantic connotations started to become associated with the traditional February 14th celebration of Saint Valentine’s Day, the Catholic church removed the official recognition of Valentine’s Feast Day and the religious aspect of the holiday was lost entirely in favour of a focus on the universal emotion of love.

The Rose Reemerges as the Symbol of Love

As more time passed St. Valentine was romanticized and, in many ways, condensed into a single figure. The new legend that was attributed to him was that he was a saint, executed after refusing the Roman Emperor Claudius II’s decree that young men remain single (in order to become better soldiers). This version of St. Valentine would secretly marry lovers and, in an unverified (but popular) version of the tale, also wrote the first “Valentine card” to his sweetheart on the night before his death sentence.

This growing mythology would eventually create an entire industry centred on a version of a version of a version of various Christian martyrs, leading to what has now become a secular holiday focused on the celebration of love.

In our last look at the history of roses and Valentine’s Day we’ll trace the final part of the story, showing how the myth of St. Valentine grew into the modern holiday we celebrate today — and why roses are such an important part of it.