Rose

No other herb inspires such poetry, inspiration, and heart opening love as the rose. Not only is it a beautiful flower with an intoxicating fragrance, but it has some great medicinal benefits as well. Rose flowers are a wonderful female tonic, cardiovascular tonic, and have been used for thousands of years as an addition to beauty and skincare recipes. Rose hips are one of the highest sources of vitamin C and are a valuable addition to immune boosting tonics. They can be made into an oil that is wonderful for the skin as well. You can read all about rose in this issue.

There are over 100 known species of rose. Once native to Europe, North America, Central Asia, and North Africa, it is now grown throughout the world in countless cultivars, making it impossible to know exactly how many different types of roses exist today.

Besides its beauty, fragrance, and mystical allure, rose was also valued for its medicinal properties. The Greeks drank a rose wine as a tonic and Pliny lists thirty-two different medicines prepared with roses. In the 16th Century, distillation techniques were developed in Persia to extract the pure essential oils and these were also quickly adopted in medicinal practices. The species most used for medicine are R. damascena, R. centifolia, R. gallica, and wild roses, such as R. canina and R. virginiana