Business is blossoming

M.S. Viraraghavan and his wife Girija are trying to put India on the rose map of the world.

December 20, 2014 05:16 pm | Updated 05:16 pm IST

M.S.Viraraghavan and Girija.

M.S.Viraraghavan and Girija.

He could be a monk. A character out of an early Herman Hesse novel, who left the busy world of the Indian Administrative Service, to disappear into the multi-petalled valleys of the roses at his garden estate at Kodaikanal, in Tamil Nadu. Next to him, his wife in her shimmering silks appears like a busy sunbird, flits from one rose bush — or habitat, to another — collecting data and images that they both like to share with the world.

Together M.S.Viraraghavan and Girija belong to the select world of Rosarians. In 2006, they won “The Great Rosarians of the World Award” by the Huntington Library and Garden, the U.S. Rosarians are people who pursue their love for the roses in different ways. Some of them have a passion for collecting them. Others for painting them in marvellous studies, often botanical, but also in voluptuous detail that often combined the erotic with the spiritual. As Viraraghavan notes in one of his milder asides, the prickly thorns of the rose have excited as much artistic license as have the intoxications of form, colour and scent.

Is there is such a thing as a rose addiction, a pheromone that lures individuals with its fragrance as it does the bumblebee? If so, the Empress Josephine the first wife of Napoleon was a Queen Bee. She planted roses in her garden at Malmaison and started a craze for them in Europe. Roses were an exotic commodity. They came all the way from China, on lumbering sailing ships carrying tea, also a luxury item in the late eighteenth century. As Viraraghavan puts it, “the rose is the simplest and purest form of love or reverence available to even the humblest.”

To some of us, the famous Mughal gardens with their rose beds and marble pavilions, or the portraits of turbaned Princes and Princesses holding a perfect rose in one hand, has morphed in our memories of the first Indian Prime Minister, Pandit Nehru, wearing a fresh rose in the buttonhole of his achkan.

In one of the numerous entries that Girija has made in The Indian Rose Annual — which the couple has edited for almost three decades — is a story of how the Empress Nur Jahan came upon the “attar of roses” while noticing a film of oil floating on the surface of her hot water bath. She also has a lovely story of how, when the Gods roamed the sub-continent, Brahma claimed the lotus to be the most perfect flower. Vishnu upheld the primacy of the rose. They now have created a hybrid named Brahmavishnu, which hints at the slender pointed petals of a lotus with the delicate bloom of a rose. It reflects what Viraraghavan believes is the need of the hour — “imaginative hybridisation”, new varieties that are unique to the sub-continent.

The Italian author, Andrea di Robilant in Chasing the Rose: An Adventure in the Venetian countryside, wonders whether the mystique of the perfect rose will survive in our era of commercially-grown and cloned stock. Long-stemmed roses, thorn-free and most often scent-free, are packaged to look like soldiers. di Robilant starts with a search for an old China rose that his grandmother Lucia picked up from Empress Josephine’s garden at Malmaison. As he writes: “Back in the old days when the first Chinas arrived in Europe, at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century, rose breeders and collectors had no idea that the hills and valleys in China’s interior teemed with wild rose species like R. chinensis spontanea and R. gigantea . They assumed that many of the roses came from Chinese nurseries via Calcutta.” What makes Robilant’s book fascinating is that, in the course of his search, he also mentions the momentous discovery made by the Viraraghavans of R. gigantea on a remote mountainside of the Manipur border with Burma.

Here is how Viraraghavan describes their quest: “Now the real excitement began as we started to look around for the giant rose, and, to our surprise and delight, we came across a specimen within a few hundred yards from where we commenced our climb. Picture an enormous tea rose, with the same elongated sparsely leaved new shoots, not one and a half feet as the tea rose grows, on high, but with thorns and leaves very much like a tea rose. This was our first vision of Rosa gigantea in the shape of a climbing bush by the side of the path ascending through a tree. A little later came the real sensation of our visit — we stumbled cross an absolute giant of a rose standing some 25 feet high with branches as thick as a man’s arm.”

For the Viraraghavans, the real quest is to develop rose varieties that will do well in a warm climate. Or as he explains: “In the search for the tropical rose, my work has employed Rosa gigantea and Rosa clinophylla , not for chauvinistic reasons, but because R. gigantea is well suited for sub-tropical climates and R. clinophylla is probably the world’s only tropical wild rose. Hopefully work with these roses will produce new varieties suited for warmer parts of India and the rest of the world. “An international rose conference is of course a good way of putting India on the rose map of the world.”

Popular Indian varieties

The Kakinada Red is used for garlands.

The fragrant pinks or Edward Roses that are equally popular are the ones scattered on the road after a funeral procession has passed.

“Souvenir de la Malmaison” is a heritage rose, grown extensively in Western India. It is pale pink, almost white in colour.

0 / 0
Sign in to unlock member-only benefits!
  • Access 10 free stories every month
  • Save stories to read later
  • Access to comment on every story
  • Sign-up/manage your newsletter subscriptions with a single click
  • Get notified by email for early access to discounts & offers on our products
Sign in

Comments

Comments have to be in English, and in full sentences. They cannot be abusive or personal. Please abide by our community guidelines for posting your comments.

We have migrated to a new commenting platform. If you are already a registered user of The Hindu and logged in, you may continue to engage with our articles. If you do not have an account please register and login to post comments. Users can access their older comments by logging into their accounts on Vuukle.