The ancient perfume rose of the Middle East, distilled into rose otto and rose water for over a thousand years and still the gold standard for fragrance.
Where it grows
Long cultivated rather than truly wild, the damask is grown commercially in the Valley of the Roses in Bulgaria, in Isparta in Turkey, in Iran around Kashan, and increasingly in Morocco and India. It needs cold winters to set buds and a warm dry harvest just before dawn.
How to recognise it
A vigorous shrub reaching two metres, with grey-green pinnate leaves and dense thickets of slender thorns. The semi-double, cupped blooms carry around 30 petals in soft warm pink and exhale a heavy, sweet, slightly spicy scent. Most cultivars flower in one intense flush rather than repeatedly.
Garden & cultural uses
It takes roughly four tonnes of damask petals to distill a single kilogram of rose otto, making it one of the costliest essential oils in perfumery. Rose water flavors Persian, Turkish, and Indian sweets such as gulab jamun and Turkish delight, and underpins traditional skin lotions.
In folklore
Persian poets including Rumi and Hafez wrote endlessly of the rose’s brief perfume as a metaphor for divine love. Crusaders are credited, perhaps wrongly, with carrying the damask back to Europe.
Find more flowers by letter
Damask Rose starts with D and ends with E. Browse other flowers along the same letter.
Flowers that contain a letter from "Damask Rose":