The dog in the dog rose is a beetle. The insect crosses a white petal suffused with pinkiness; it moves fluidly in the articulated vehicle of the exoskeleton that protects its inner flame. It looks like one of the Cantharidae, a soldier beetle; perhaps it’s on manoeuvres, preparing for a new War of the Roses, and battles between conflicting realities – the common vernacular wisdom of hedge-witchery versus the elite initiates of the mysteries of occult science.
The dog rose got its name from a 16th-century translation of the Latin Rosa canina, which comes from the Greek cynorrhodon, a rebuke that this is not a garden rose. Instead, it is a plant of the common wilds, and not so much a species as a complex of microspecies and hybrids, with a diversity of flower, fruit and prickle characteristics and genetic possibilities. Dog rose has the run of the waysides and wastes to express itself in a thousand subtle ways, and an ancient lineage that refuses to be fixed; it is vernacular and unrepeatable, spontaneous and largely uncultivated, although some garden forms do exist, such as the pink-flowered, fragrant, R canina “Andersonii”.
The promiscuity of the dog rose contrasts with the meticulous breeding of the cultivated rose varieties. The latter are symbols of civilisation, a measure of artistic achievement, skill and taste, growing sensually and proudly from the symbiosis between cultivation and culture. Friedrich Nietzsche made a similar distinction between people: between the peasants and forest-dwellers of a lower culture who, like oak trees, are hardly touched by the passing of time, and those of a higher culture, who are moved to self-pity and suffer because of time’s passing. “He who wants to harvest happiness and contentment from life,” says Nietzsche, “has only to avoid acquiring a higher culture.”
I wonder if the soldier beetle is happy and content on the dog rose. These two beings share a magic rich with ecological connections that are almost unimaginable to us, yet watching them brings such joy. In a war of the roses – wild versus cultivated – I think I’ll avoid the higher culture.
