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Festival (with a Rose Queen), and our rose farms provide flowers to cities far and wide. Why? It all goes back to the appeal of roses: their simplicity, their beauty, and even the challenge of growing and picking them. Roses symbolize love, magic, hope, passion, beauty and perfection. That's quite a bit for one little flower!
Did you know that roses can also be eaten? The fruit of the rose is called a rose hip and is similar to a berry. Each hip contains 5 to 160 "seeds" embedded in a bundle of fine hairs. Rose hips are very high in Vitamin C. Rose water is made from distilling the petals, and it's a flavoring used in many types of cooking.
Each color of rose has its symbolism. If someone treats you to a bouquet of roses, maybe they're trying to tell you something! Traditionally, they mean:
If you want to save your roses, maybe you'd like to air dry them. It's not hard--you will need clippers, a basket (or other container) and some rubber bands. The secret to air drying roses is to dry the flowers as quickly as possible. Select stems of rose blooms a few days before their prime, and only the perfect blooms. Past prime roses usually drop their petals too easy when dried, and damaged blooms are unsightly in dried arrangements.
Remove the lower leaves from the stems, then using rubber bands to fasten, group harvested roses together in small bunches, being careful that no blooms touch each other. Hang the individual bunches upside down in a dry, dark, warm area. A clothes hanger in an empty closet works great, or from the ceiling in a kitchen. Air drying times vary with humidity, but the roses should dry within five to ten days normally.
To learn more about roses, visit the American Rose Society.
And to learn more about Tyler's Texas Rose Festival, visit www.texasrosefestival.com
Published 06/01/07
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What's the attraction for roses? After all, they're just a type of flowering shrub. Yet here in Tyler, Texas (Brookshire's home town), we're known as the rose capitol of the world. We hold an annual Rose 
