The origin of this festival, there is a Roman priest named Valentine. In the third century, Emperor Claudius II outlawed marriage Gothic, engaged couples making poor soldiers, because of their love and commitment to family. Valentine, who secretly married couples, was unmasked and arrested.

It is said that during his captivity, he befriended the blind daughter of his jailer, when he miraculously restored the sight. Before his execution, Valentine sent it to the girl leaves heart-shaped.

He was beheaded in Rome on February 14 268, and canonized by Pope Alexander VI in the 15th century. Since it is considered the patron saint of lovers, and love is celebrated each February 14.

There is no need to wait for Valentine’s Day to declare your love.

Roses can be killed or injured during winter in several ways: direct injury to tops or roots from extreme cold; rapid temperature changes; root injury from dry-out as a result of plants being heaved by alternate freezing and thawing; injury caused by mice under snow; and snow or ice breakage.

Injury from extreme cold can be avoided only by selecting hardy varieties. As a rule, roses with small blossoms tend to be hardier than the largest flowering types. Most hybrid tea varieties are less hardy than the grandifloras or floribundas.  In addition, some climbing roses and many old-fashioned bush varieties tend to be hardy as are some series such as “Explorer” out of Canada. Hardiness depends on variety and type. However, this is based more on observation than actual hardiness studies, so gardeners must be willing to take chances and experiment with different varieties. But the good news is that proper winter protection can help plants survive.

For bush varieties, start by mounding soil 10 to 12 inches around the base of the plants. Then add another 12 to 16 inches of mulching material such as leaf mold, straw, hay, or pine needles over the mound to help stabilize soil temperatures. This extra protection means less freezing, thawing, and subsequent heaving.  If you have many rodents around, you may want to skip the mulch materials as they provide a winter home for unwanted wildlife.  Ideally, mounding should be applied in mid to late November. Earlier application may slow development of stem maturity and hardiness.

You may need to prune the canes back to the surface of the mulch for ease of covering, but don’t cut back any further. Wait until spring, so you can see which canes or parts of canes have died, then cut them back. If the winter is mild, or your mulching thick, you may have to cut back very little.

Climbing roses survive the winter best when you remove the canes from the fence or trellis and fasten them to the ground. Snow cover will protect them from extremely low temperatures. Where snow cover is undependable, mound snow or mulch over the canes on the ground. Remove the mulch as plants start to grow. Earlier removal may cause the rose stems to dry out. The common practice of wrapping stems and trellises with straw and paper or burlap provides, at most, a few degrees of protection on cold nights. It is less dependable than protecting stems with soil on the ground. You can also make a frame to catch snow if snow cover is reliable in your area.

Remember, these precautions will not always ensure survival and prevent injury. However, they usually will enable northern gardeners to grow some of the less hardy roses.

A mulch will not only keep the soil warmer than unmulched soil, but will also prevent rapid fluctuations in soil temperatures which lead to soil heaving.  Snow is the best mulch, but as we know, can not always be counted on.  So other materials must be used.

A good mulch will settle lightly on the soil surface without excessive packing (this rules out most oak leaves), cause no harmful effects (such as from diseases or weed seeds), and be reasonably attractive and priced.  Mulches derived from plants will also add organic matter to the soil.  Examples of good organic mulches are peat moss, weed-free straw (not hay, which is often weedy), cut evergreen branches, bark mulch, or wood chips.

Mulches should be piled at least a foot deep around plants, and not before mid-November, as roses need cool fall temperatures to develop some winter hardiness.  Mulch much later and you may have to contend with snow first, and valuable ground heat will have been lost.

Mounding may also be used to protect roses during winter, simply mounding loose soil a foot or more high around the base of the plant.  Use loose sandy or loamy soil, as dense clay soil may cut off the oxygen supply to the roots, resulting in injured or dead plants.  Soil mounding is preferable over mulches if you have mice that may live in organic material and chew on the rose stems.

Climbing roses may be protected by removing the canes from their supports (keep this in mind in the spring when tying them up, for easy fall removal), then laying them on the ground.  Use a wire hoop or similar device to hold them in place.  Lay a piece of burlap over the canes to protect them during the spring uncovering operation, then mound soil over the canes.  Uncover the canes when they begin to grow in spring, checking them in early April or shortly after the snow melts.

Mulching or mounding protects roses in a couple of ways.  Roses vary greatly in their hardiness, depending on species and cultivars, with the more hardy not even needing protection.

Most roses also are grafted onto a hardier wild rose understock.  This “graft union” is the swollen area you can find at the base of many rose plants.  It is often tender and susceptible to winter injury, so needs protection.  Many recommend to even bury this graft union below the surface when planting, which will also help prevent undesirable sucker canes arising from the wild rose understock.

Before mulching or mounding roses in mid to late November, finish fall cleanup.  Remove all plant debris and diseased parts.  Pruning, although usually done in spring, may be done now to remove diseased or dead stems and to make the plant easier to mulch.  Even with protection, canes may have some dieback and need further pruning in the spring.  Prune then after leaves come out.  Waiting until then you’ll know which stems and parts are truly winter-killed.

Rose scent may be more powerful with the first blooms of summer.  Rose scent even can change from outdoors to indoors.  Just the cutting can change the chemical releases that we smell, so a rose not very fragrant outdoors may be quite scented once in a vase inside.

The other fact to keep in mind is that scent in flowers, including roses, is not meant by nature for us but rather for the pollinators of the flowers.  Scents in flowers are signals to those pollinators such as some bees to come visit the flowers, and are often smelled before they see the flowers.

Flowers release scent when they are ready to be pollinated, which in roses often translates to a more powerful scent when flowers are half open.

In general, roses with the best scents are darker colors, have more petals, and have thick or velvety petals.  Red and pink roses often smell like what we term “rose”.  White and yellows often smell of violets, nasturtium, and lemon.  Orange roses often smell of fruits, violets, nasturtium, and clove.

Most true rose oil comes from Bulgaria, Morocco, Iran, Turkey, and more recently from China.  The oil is extracted from the petals either with alcohol or through distillation.  The true oil is very expensive as it takes about 250 pounds of petals to make a mere ounce of oil.

For this reason, rose oil is often diluted with similarly scented oils such as geraniol from geraniums, or even the synthetic phenylethanol.  While fine for fragrance uses, and excellent for making them affordable, if using rose oil medicinally you need the true oil and not a product marked “fragrance”.

Rose oil has been used medicinally from the ancient Chinese, through medieval times, even through the present.  One use is for skincare, especially for dry, sensitive, and aging skin.  Another use is as a mild sedative, antidepressant, and for stress conditions.  Rose oil (or tea from the petals) may help digestion, stomach ailments, or sore throat.

Vitamins A, C, and P come from roses.  Rose scent even may aid memory.  In a German study, people spritzed with rose scent during a memory exercise, then again while sleeping, had 13 percent better recall.

The next time you smell a rose, try and discern some of the many possible scents and how they change over time and under different conditions.

Roses have been around and are documented longer than most of our garden plants.  The earliest record of them seems to be rose leaves found in the Colorado Rockies, dating back 35 to 32 million years to the Paleolithic era.  First mention of them, and their appearance in artistic motifs, was in Asia about 3000BC, with mention elsewhere about 2300 BC.

The fragrance of roses was valued by the Romans, used to scent rooms and after bathing.  Cleopatra supposedly filled a room over a foot deep with rose petals while wooing Marc Anthony.  The two main roses used in this era were the Damask and Gallica types.

Rose oil, often seen as “attar of roses” or “rose otto”, was probably first made in 10th century Persia.  This was the first import of roses to Europe, leading to the subsequent growing of the plants there.

Prior to the Victorian era of the late 1800’s, fragrance in flowers was used for functions such as medicinally or to hide odors.  This period saw the use of flowers in gardens and homes merely for their pleasing fragrance.

This era also saw the first attempts to define and classify scents.  Yet, it wasn’t until later in the last century that the seven main rose scents were accepted, and the responsible chemicals identified.

The seven main rose scents are rose (or damask), nasturtium, orris (which is similar to violets), violets, apple, clove, and lemon (the fruit, not the blossoms).  Orris is a compound used to fix or preserve odors.

Then there are 26 other less common odors you may smell in roses.  These include such diverse ones as honeysuckle, moss, hyacinth, honey, wine, marigold, peppers, parsley, and fruits such as raspberry.

Scent in roses, depending on which one, comes from one or more of over 300 chemical compounds.  Yet in rose oil, only four make up less than one percent but produce over 90 percent of the fragrance.

If you think rose scent is getting complicated, consider how we smell.  These chemicals evaporate and our nose receptors pick up the volatile compounds.  Each of these evaporate at a different rate, which means that rose fragrance will change over time.  For example, clove evaporates 36 times more slowly than citrus, so once you pick up a citrus scent it can disappear with the clove scent appearing later.