Green Roses Meaning: The Real Story of the Green Rose

Spring and summer offer the splendid opportunity to revitalize your home décor with fresh, fragrant, and tasteful new blooms. From peonies to honeysuckle, we are longstanding proponents of sprucing up your home with beautiful, newly-blossomed flowers. It’s one of those rituals that makes the changing of seasons all the sweeter.

Here at Venus ET Fleur®, we never turn down the chance to celebrate the wonder and variety of roses, particularly as we approach another wonderful National Rose Month this June. We thought it would be a fun and illuminating exercise to celebrate our favorite color variants of this timeless, peerless flower. In this article, we’ll be shedding some light on one of its least understood, yet most charming incarnations: the green rose.

In this article, we will discuss what makes the green rose such a unique and misunderstood bloom in traditional flower-giving culture, while also shining a light on some unique ways to deploy these rare treasures to splendid effect. With the right guidance, we know they will bring joy and fragrance into both your home and your life.

Roses and Their Meanings

More than simply a way to add color and fragrance to our lives and spaces, it should come as no surprise that roses also serve as symbols of deeper meaning. Most of us can probably name the classic red rose as the quintessential flower of love, though we might not fully grasp all the many meanings of different rose colors. Understanding these details can be a challenge for the giver but a treat for the recipient, and is a must for anyone looking to expand their gift-giving repertoire.

Our cultural sense of these different flower meanings originates in Victorian England, where the practice of floriography took off among the aristocracy as a way to send deep and often intimate messages, the decoding of which was half the fun. The custom, it was said, had been discovered in Turkey, though it had truly been in practice across the Middle East for what is believed to be thousands of years.

What started as a fad among London courtiers exploded in popularity, particularly in the United States, where between 1827 and 1923, nearly a hundred floral dictionaries were in print.

The Story of the Green Rose

The very first records of green roses come from China in the 18th century. These blooms were reputedly grown in the garden of the imperial palace, or Forbidden City, and were the sole property of the emperor. Over a century later, the British nursery Bembridge and Harrison introduced green roses to the public in 1856—commentators at the time noted their particularly large blooms.

What is most interesting about these earliest-cultivated green roses is the fact that what appears to be their petals are, in fact, sepals—the technical term for the green leaves you might find along the stem of any wild-growing rose. This rare specimen had undergone a mutation that caused its sepals to grow in the shape of petals, giving it a unique and quite shocking appearance. They proved to be quite a popular curio in their time.

These rare blooms also have a place in American folklore—according to certain legends, a number of Quaker families in the 19th century would plant green roses in their yards to secretly signify to fugitive slaves that they were conductors of the Underground Railroad.

However, it’s important to note that today, this particular mutation of the rose has largely been replaced by modern garden roses that have been crossbred with a more aesthetically appealing green pigmentation. The 20th century saw tremendous achievements in floral cultivation that have allowed for once-unimagined varieties in terms of rose coloration, and we at Venus ET Fleur celebrate these innovators for giving us a green rose to treasure and enjoy.

The Green Rose: Meaning

Green is a classic earth tone that is often symbolically associated with material richness, fertility, and abundance. Giving someone a bouquet of green roses typically conveys cheerfulness and the anticipation of new beginnings. Since green is the color of nature, these roses also symbolize rebirth and rejuvenation—the renewal of one’s life and spirit.

The green rose is also traditionally believed to symbolize good fortune. Is someone you know about to embark on a new personal journey, business venture, relationship, or creative idea? Or perhaps you know someone who would benefit from a little bit of luck? If so, green is certainly one of the most fitting rose color choices—representing money, luck, and success. Sending an exquisite emerald green Eternity® Rose arrangement is one of the best ways to congratulate a friend or family member on a new job, a new baby, or renewed wedding vows.

Giving the Gift of Green Roses

Since this color of rose is often underappreciated, we’ve decided to offer a few suggestions of occasions for which a bouquet of green roses would really hit the mark, as well as a few like arrangements that we think show off their color splendidly, all featuring our elegant Eternity® Roses.

Our Eternity Roses are real roses that will last for a year or more with the proper care. We’ve made this possible by a unique preservation process that maintains the flower’s natural beauty. In fact, each of these elegant blooms retains the fragrant perfume that we expect of a rose. Probably because they are made with real roses!

Our blooms are grown with care and sunshine on a lush farm in Ecuador’s rose fields. Some of the world’s most beautiful rose blooms come from this part of the earth, as the rich, year-round equatorial sunshine breeds a rich, red rose.

Among their many available colors, our Eternity Roses can come in two shades of green—soft mint and a deeper, richer dark green.

Without further ado, here are some choice occasions on which these charming green blooms simply excel as a gift.

Engagements

When we ponder the best times in our life to rejoice in—and hope for—good fortune, the prospect of new love looms the largest. If a friend or loved one of yours has recently gotten engaged, a radiant bouquet of green roses sends a thoughtful message of good luck and prosperity on this life-changing new voyage.

An excellent arrangement for such an occasion is our peerless Fleura Vase, a masterful piece from our Maison Collection. Featuring a bouquet of two dozen radiant Eternity Roses nestled in a handcrafted ceramic vessel, this piece drips with class and sophistication. Not only will this piece make a marvelous appearance in any setting—from a dining room centerpiece to a piece of coffee table décor—its voluminous fragrance will fill the room with pure rosy goodness.

Promotions, Graduations, and Congratulations

We love roses for so many reasons--not only do they simply add richness and fragrance to our lives, but we also admire the way they so effortlessly mark milestones. Celebrating the achievements of that special person in your life with a collection of emerald-green roses is the perfect way to recognize that recent graduate for all their hard work.

Or perhaps you’re giving them to a close friend who just secured the job of their dreams! Either way, they are sure to feel doubly victorious when they see and smell an elegant green rose arrangement.

For a modest yet still elegant piece that perfectly suits a celebration of personal success, look no further than the Le Petit. A bestseller from our Classic Collection, the magnificent arrangement piece consists of a quatrain of fragrant, emerald-green Eternity Roses neatly nestled in a small suede box (modeled after a Parisian hat-box). Not only does it simply exemplify charm and elegance, but its space-efficient design also allows it to live comfortably atop an office desk or end table.

Final Thoughts

We’re grateful to the charming, nontraditional green rose. If you want to celebrate good fortune, new life, or simply redecorate your home for springtime, you really can’t go wrong with this unique and fragrant bloom! We hope our small history of the green rose has taught you one or two new things.

There’s a good chance you’re here searching for that perfect arrangement to give to someone special in your life--if so, we highly recommend you read more with us on other colors of the rose and their symbolic meanings. There is so much to say and so many wonderful blooms to say it with.

Don’t forget that Venus ET Fleur also offers custom arrangements in a spectacular variety of different shapes and sizes, and including 24 different vibrant shades. If you want to craft the perfect, specific message for a loved one that can’t be expressed in a single color, we encourage you to reach out to one of our virtuoso flower specialists to help you today!

Sources:

National Rose Month - June | National Day Calendar

Rose Color Meanings for Every Color Rose | Reader's Digest

Victorian flowers and their meaning - The Smell of Roses

The Green Rose | Science Friday