"ONE CAN FALL IN LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT", is a statement often heard, but it was Mark Twain who immediately qualified this with: "BUT NOT WITH A HOMELY WOMAN."

As with men and women, so too with roses: love at first sight is a direct response to beauty - falling at first sight under the spell of Buff Beauty is possible, if not downright easy; but falling for Viridiflora syn. the Green Rose at first sight is a feat that still seems to be awaiting its first victim.

To be beautiful is to have "qualities that delight the senses, especially the sense of sight", but what is it about a person or a rose, that lets us decide they are beautiful?

Until recently it was thought that the eye, or more correctly, the brain of the beholder held an inbuilt set of standards that placed a high value on symmetry and biological averages, i.e. beauty related to health unblemished by accident, mutation, and/or disease.

In terms of evolution, the preferential selection of beautiful mates meant that healthy (lucky?) genes passed to the next generation. While this theory supported the findings of many psychologists, it did not answer several key questions concerning differing cultural ideals of beauty nor explained historical shifts in beauty standards.

Recently University scientists Piotr Winkielman in California, and Jamin Halberstadt at our own Otago University, have measured people's ideas of beauty as seen in patterns of dots, as strange as that may sound.

They have concluded that our concept of beauty is not hardwired into our brains, but is instead developed as the result of all that we as individuals have previously seen:

Although not stated in their conclusions, this explanation does account for the increasing numbers of individuals dissatisfied with the way they look. Manipulated images are no recent invention - artists routinely painted to flatter wealthy patrons, and photographers have been shedding weight from women's waists with a paintbrush applied to photographic plates from the very first. However the sheer volume and pervasiveness of artificial and unattainable images have increased dramatically over recent years, and appear to have caused a profound shift in our concept of what is beautiful.

But what does all this mean to us as Heritage Rosarians? Whether a person thinks a heritage rose is beautiful is entirely dependent on the roses they have already seen, whether these were real roses in a bunch or on a bush, or images of roses in photographs or paintings, in books, newspapers, magazines, television, Internet, and movies. Given the continuing preponderance of Hybrid Tea roses, it is hardly surprising that many individuals hold the classic HT rose, and the classic HT rose bush, to be their only ideal of beauty in a rose. When presented with a rose that looks completely different to a HT, those people struggle both to recognise that e.g. Mutabilis is a rose, and to find beauty in the single blooms and the twiggy growth of the bush.

'Those people' can be transformed into 'people like us'. Continued exposure to new and different types of roses, together with a willingness to find beauty outside their initial ideals will change an individual's ideals of beauty. Progression towards a comprehensive appreciation of all heritage roses is generally first expressed as a preference for a very double rose - the English Roses particularly or the Hybrid Perpetuals perhaps, before gradually widening through the Hybrid Musk class, until they find themselves admiring single roses, and regarding even the small white flowered species roses as being beautiful. Whether they progress as far as finding beauty in Rosa omeiensis pteracanta and (the final stumbling block) Viridiflora is an entirely different question.

The message is clear - plant more heritage roses in more locations, and invite lots of people to see and experience these roses: this will expand their ideals of beauty in roses, and might even make them better people.