Everything's Coming Up Roses

 If you've ever sniffed rose perfume, chances are you've smelled Bulgaria.  This is the land of Rosa damascene, the damask rose, which French scent houses and essential oil companies call "Bulgarian gold."  Over seventy percent of the world's rose oil is distilled here in Bulgaria.  Though a lot of the industry is centered around the town of Rosa damascene, the whole countryside is redolent of the flowers.

Rose oil is called "otto" here, and it's special for a couple of reasons.  First, the climate of Bulgaria is supposed to be better suited for growing roses than anywhere else - the flowers have a more ambrosial quality, some say, and the otto smells more like roses than oil produced in other countries.  Also, the Bulgarians grow older, heritage varieties which have much more scent, and they have a longstanding tradition of distillation and cultivation.
Most importantly, Bulgaria isn't a wealthy country and it's very, very expensive to produce rose otto.  A single ounce of high quality oil requires about one hundred and seventy pounds of rose petals - thousands and thousands of flowers.  The process is labor intensive, highly agricultural, thorny and nobody else wants to do it.  Not exactly romantic work, but the people here are proud of it.
At one of dozens of "Rose of Bulgaria" stores, tourists can buy all kinds of pink skin creams, shampoos and perfumed soaps.

It's no surprise that people eat roses - they belong to the same family (Rosaceae) as apples, plums, cherries and myriad other fruit trees.  Rose water - a byproduct of otto production - is common here, and finds its way into some foods.  There are cakes and Turkish delight (appropriated and dubbed "Bulgarian delight") made with the stuff, as well as marzipan, syrup and even a few cocktails.  There are also more than a few varieties of tea made from the petals, and a whole host of products made from the rose hips.
When we were staying in the little town of Bachevo, we made these rose-jam butter cookies using two different Bulgarian preserves - a "jam" made with candied petals and a rose hip "marmalade."

The marmalade (on the left) obviously tasted much fruitier, and it was hard to detect any rose essence at all.  The jam was much sweeter and the taste was surprising - it was difficult to distinguish between flavor and fragrance.  The scent of a rose is so distinct; it's a shock to have it meet one's tongue.  In fact, the first impression it gave was of eating soap, though it doesn't actually taste soapy at all.  

On toast, the hip marmalade was better.  On cookies, the floral jam stood out in a great way.  

 

At the Queen's Winery House in Balchik, which hawks its wares right inside Queen Marie's seaside gardens, there's a rather syrupy-sounding rose wine.  We assumed it would be a cloying, saccharine sip, but it was actually not bad.  Or, rather, it was bad - but not as bad as cough-syrup-pink rose wine with honey could be.

Rosa damascene was brought to Bulgaria by the Ottomans in the 16th century, and the Turks still cultivate the flowers heavily - Turkish oil is now the main competition for Bulgarian otto.  China has begun distilling recently, and Morocco and Pakistan have rose industries.  Persia claims to be the birthplace of the genus, but Syria disagrees.  France is the largest importer of otto, and has a long history with the plant.
But it is Bulgaria, certainly, where the rose smells sweetest - it has come to be a symbol for the nation.  There are blossom festivals in the springtime and harvest traditions, roses planted in roundabouts and postcard pictures of baskets of flowers. In the evening, especially as dusk settles in, the gardens and trellises of this nation are as fragrant as any place on earth.

The 'Quiet Nest' On The Black Sea

"I never thought about how well the sound of the sea goes with the smell of roses," Rebecca said.  We were walking through a June flood of blossoms, the ground strewn with petals. In the Bulgarian seaside town of Balchik, high up above the beach, a cascading paradise of terraces and waterfalls spills down towards the water.  It's crowded, hot, steep and overpriced - but completely worth it.  Once the private retreat of Queen Marie of Romania, it's now one of the best looked-after and beautiful botanical gardens we've ever seen.  Marie loved it so much she had her heart buried here, locked up in a gold box.  The heart's no longer here, the gardens have been thrown open to the public, it's not even Romania anymore - but the place is still full of stories about the queen, her lovers and love for Balchik.

Marie of Romania began her extraordinary life as Princess Marie of Edinburgh, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria on her father's side, a granddaughter of Emperor Alexander II on her mother's side.  She grew up in Windsor Palace and the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg and, from the beginning, was something of an enchantress.  In June 1900, Cosmopolitan said that "without being regularly beautiful, she is exceedingly pretty and winsome, in addition to which she excels in all the arts of coquetry and flirtation."  Indeed, flirtation became something of her calling card - her own daughter, when trying to dispel rumors of her mothers infidelities said that there had "only" been three men other than her father who had become regular characters in the family's life, but that's mis-stating the accusation.  Marie was a legendary seductress.
The young Princess's first cousin, Prince George (later King George V), proposed to her when she was seventeen, but her mother refused to let her marry him, finding for her instead the somewhat boring Prince Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Romania.

Marie never liked Ferdinand, but she loved Romania.  On a trip along the shore, riding on horseback, she fell especially for Balchik, which wasn't much more than a rocky cove of limestone cliffs and shady vineyards.  She described being pulled into mud huts so that she could bless the children there, and riding past all sorts of character in the villages around.  It was a distant, wild land at the time, far removed from the royal court in Bucharest.
A few years later, in 1926, as her husband's health declined, Marie began work on a garden and "palace" there, to be the seaside residence of the court.  It's a small, understated building to be called a palace, but it's pretty and comfortable and quirky, which is exactly what the queen had wanted (her mountain "palace" in the Carpathians was a treehouse).  On one side is a church, on the other a minaret (Marie had begun following the Bahá'í faith, which recognizes all religions as one), beside it is a watermill, in front is the sea.

At the time, Marie was perhaps more beloved in Romania than her husband - while Ferdinand had abandoned the front during WWI, his wife had worked in Army hospitals and stayed quite close to the action, handing out medals and calling herself an "encourager" - Romanian soldiers were said to have gone into battle shouting "Regina Maria!" instead of the name of their king.
Marie showed up to the signing of the Treaty of Versailles uninvited, to represent Romania against her husband's wishes. While there, she negotiated for Besserabia to be added to her crown lands, which more than doubled Romania's pre-war population and made her a heroine.  In the process, she also shocked Woodrow Wilson with frank discussions about sex - she showed him a photograph of her "love child," and explained to the president why this daughter was darker-skinned than her other children.

In fact, there were a whole host of sensationalized affairs - everyone from Lord Waldorf Astor and Crown Prince William of Prussia to Russian Grand Dukes and a certain Colonel Joe Boyle of the Canadian Army found their way into Marie's bed - including one that would leave a lasting mark on Balchik itself.  Jules Janin, the Swiss gardener, was said to have been lured to the Black Sea coast not only by the position as gardener to the queen, but also as one of her lovers.  She built him a little house, high up in the garden, and entrusted the entire garden design to him.

What Janin created is spectacular.  A playful mix of formality and wilderness, it brought the more modernist English garden aesthetic of the twenties to a warmer, seaside climate.  There are rows of cacti intermingled with boxwood topiary, ginkos and rubber trees, wooded glades of wildflowers and square-lined flower beds.  It's a colorful, eclectic mix that has nothing to do with the court gardens of other royal residences.  Wandering from space to space, the demeanor of the plants changes, from stiffly arranged to almost untended and relaxed.  There are two waterfalls and a few rocky pools, water sounds are a constant.  Views outward over the sea open up unexpectedly, then gets closed off again.  In all, there are about two thousand species planted here.  Hundreds and hundreds of roses fill in the margins, all just reaching their peak when we visited.

There are six main terraces below the parklike upper reaches of the garden.  It's said that Marie wanted one for each of her children (including the "love child"), and the character of each supposedly reflects the nature of her different offspring.  From above, the terraces look sun-burnt and dry.  Lower, one finds ingeniously placed pockets of shade and pools of water.  Stairs meander up and down, it's impossible to find a direct route from one place to another.  Just beyond the lower wall, strolling couples pass by with ice cream cones and sunbathers pay to sit below umbrellas.

June is probably the best month to go garden visiting - the colors are the brightest, the flowers are at their most raucous, the leaves have most of their springtime green.  There is now a winery housed in some of the old buildings, and free tastings are included in the admission price - we tasted some honeyed wines during a lull in the tour-group crush, but didn't linger there long.  All the people made the gardens a bit hectic, but one could sense the peace that it once possessed, when only the sound of the waves would waft up the slope.  Marie called Balchik her "Quiet Nest."

When Marie died, she was to be buried at Castle Bran, in Transylvania, which had become her primary home.  Her heart, though, was buried in her seaside chapel in Balchik, enclosed in a glass jar within a gold sarcophagus.  It was supposedly her last wish.
Not much more than two years later, though, Bulgaria gained control of this part of the coast.  Though the new proprietors promised to take good care of Marie's heart and the chapel, the Romanians decided that they wanted to have their queen's organ remain in Romanian soil, so they reburied it in the Transylvanian alps.  Unfortunately, not long after this, the new communist government dug the sarcophagus up again and put it in storage, where it's mostly remained - it's now scheduled to be part of a temporary exhibition at a museum in Bran.  It's sad - I'm sure the Queen wouldn't have cared who controlled Balchik.  After all, it's still her place.

Jardin Exotique

Perched high above Port de Fontvieille in Monaco, with views of the French and Italian Rivieras, there is the Monegasque Exotic Garden. Opened in 1933, it was the brainchild of Prince Albert I (dubbed "Prince Savant") and took twenty years to create. A large number of the plants were already hanging around, part of a collection housed in the principality since the 19th century. Today, there are over 1000 different species in the tiered, cliff-side garden.
Something that's surprised us about this country is its lushness. Plants are everywhere and there's at least ten different parks and gardens scattered around - but none like the Jardin Exotique. It feels like a botanic garden, an art museum and a safari rolled into one. The plants may originate from the Americas, Asia and Africa, but most have been living right there in Monaco for so long that you're - in a sense - seeing them in their natural habitats. The original plants in the collection are still thriving over a hundred years later.
Unlike most gardens, these plants flower at varying times of the year and, even, of the day. They are succulents - plants that store water, like agave and cactus. They are hardy, resilient colonizers that know how to survive in tough environments. There wasn't an overwhelming amount of signage in the garden, but just enough to give you an appreciation for what you were looking at. Many of these species are greatly endangered in their country of origin, due to urban, industrial and agricultural influences. To a large extent, this is a conservatory and it feels almost encyclopedic in its variety.
The thing about succulents - they are just so darn fun to look at. I'm not knocking roses or anything, but, as Gertrude Stein once said, "a rose is a rose is a rose." Here, most of the scenery felt brand new. Some plants are downright sculptural and the textures are unbelievable. Some look like enormous flowers, some look like they're covered in burgundy velvet. Some are as small as a baseball, others reach as high as a chestnut tree. Some hang from above, with their roots floating in pond water.
So many gardens that I've been to have seemed too organized, too curated, too spaced out to really build a sense of environment. That is absolutely not the case here, where you're not as worried about trampling a flower than you are of one drawing blood if you get too near. That is, I think, it's most appealing feature. These plants are every bit as beautiful to look at, but have a sort of inherent strength. You completely forget that someone planted them. You're in their world, they're not on show in yours.
Over 21 million visitors have walked through the Exotic Garden, according to its posted statistics. A few choice cacti bore evidence of the people that had come before; names were scrawled, scratched into their skin. Twenty one million is just a fraction of the people who have gone to Monte Carlo casino or the prince's palace. Overflow from the Carnival cruise line parked in the main port didn't find its way up here. On a hot Saturday, it was one of the least congested places we'd visited, but there was still a good amount of activity.
Merlin took some great black and white shots of a trio of cacti standing tall, against the blank sky - but I felt like it gave a sense of barrenness or desolation that simply doesn't exist in the space. It s about as similar to a dessert as an aquarium is to the ocean. In a lot of ways, it feels overgrown and congested. You walk across faux wooden bridges and down staircases with exotic plants all around you at all times. But, still, when you look down at the rest of Monaco, you feel a sort of bizarre tranquility - up, on the top of a cliff, surrounded by a rare world of plants.

Vatican Gardens

About one third of Vatican City's territory is covered by gardens and parkland - all of it off limits to the public. Off limits, unless you sign up for a garden tour, which we did. You can buy tickets online here. A bonus: possessing a tour ticket allows one to skip the monstrously long line into the museums, where the tour begins.

This view is of most of the gardens, taken from the top of the basilica dome. The large building in the bottom left of the photo is the "governatorato vaticano," the headquarters of the country's pontifically appointed government. The small building just to the right of it is the head gardener's residence.

We were led by an enthusiastic, older woman who liked to laugh about things and let us look around mostly in peace. There isn't as much to see as one might think; the gardens, being closed to the public, serve as parking for Vatican workers and as a kind of catch-all place to display gifts from small countries. There was a sculpture from Armenia, another from Slovenia, a replica of the grotto at Lourdes (given by France and very tacky), various Madonnas gifted to John Paul II and a huge colony of monk parrots (appropriate name!) screeching in the trees, a present from some forgotten, South American dignitary.
Another knick-knack: a bell celebrating the 2000 papal jubilee. Our guide reminisced about the good old days when she had been allowed to ring it during the tour. Now, a bar is fixed through the clapper, which she seemed to interpret as a personal rebuke. Also in this picture: red-faced men resting. The grounds are "quite hilly," according to the pre-tour warning given by the ticket office, and some people were having a difficult time. I would call the grounds "pleasantly sloping." You needn't be scared.
There is a crew of thirty-seven gardeners employed there, and we saw people at work all over. The main work is done maintaining topiary and lawn, as there are few extensive flower beds. A state of low-grade anticipation seemed to have taken hold - it's spring, but the climate is warm enough that the change from winter isn't dramatic. There will be more blooms in the future, I'm sure, but it's a gradual transition.
Our guide seemed to think that the group had been anxiously awaiting this sight: the papal heliport. I'm not sure that we were as impressed by it as she was. The helicopter is stored elsewhere. Not much was going on.
Inside one hedge, where we weren't allowed to go, is a small vegetable garden, which has existed off and on since antiquity. This little, papal Ape 150 was loaded up with holy weeds plucked (possibly) from amongst the pope's lettuce.
The gardens are closed in the afternoon, when they are available to the pope for his daily walk. It is the only place, according to our guide, where the pope can walk freely in the outdoors. It was a pleasant place, really, and mostly empty when we were there. The only other people were part of a German tour - which we encountered a few times - the workers and the people who were walking with us. It was a relief after the crowds in the museum and the crush in the basilica. I'm sure that the pope is glad to have a simple, open place to wander in peace.

The gnarled dwarf of a tree on the left, between the palm and the photographer, is an olive tree - one of three planted here over 800 years ago.

I can certainly recommend taking a tour of these gardens. Not because they are spectacular, because they aren't. They are pleasant, rather, and have the feel of a private oddity. A few places are quite beautiful, and it's nice to get a sense of near-solitude.

Being shepherded back into the museum was jarring - so many people, such a rush of shouting and movement.