The Ambitious Rose-Tree

The Ambitious Rose-Tree by Ouida

"The Ambitious Rose-Tree" recounts the fable of a proud Rosa Damascena growing against the wall of an orangery in a grand old garden, overshadowed by magnolias and dismissed by her, as vain and disdainful of her humble climbing neighbor, a cheerful Banksia rose. Though lovely and abundant with bloom year-round, she is tended but never cut or admired, since the garden holds far grander, more fashionable roses—titled varieties like Gloire de Dijon, Niphétos, and the Duchess of Devoniensis—blooming in the great parterre before the house. Consumed with envy of these aristocratic roses and ashamed of her own warm coloring and common lineage, Rosa Damascena longs to be pale, refined, and celebrated rather than merely healthy and prolific. She spurns the honest, plain-spoken Banksia and rebuffs a friendly blackbird who has long protected her from parasitic insects, considering his company beneath her new aspirations. Her wish is granted in a form she does not expect: the gardener grafts her stem, transforming her into a Rosa Indica, a tea-rose. The grafting is painful, and every bloom she subsequently produces is cut away by the gardener's knife for bouquets, opera corsages, and vases, each severance a real anguish to her, since a rose-tree feels the loss of every flower as human beings feel the loss of a limb. A cynical death's-head moth warns her that the fashionable destinations awaiting her offspring—ballrooms, opera boxes, ladies' bosoms—are places of swift death, but she dismisses the warning as envious ignorance. Each summer she becomes more fully a tea-rose and suffers proportionally: her foliage thins, her once-constant blooming falters, and her body is marked by repeated wounds, yet she basks in the admiring exclamations of visitors who mistake her for a rare, pedigreed Niphétos. Eventually she is uprooted from the garden entirely and moved into a glasshouse among exotic, Latin-named plants, where she flowers untouched by the knife and grows increasingly conceited, forgetting her origins except to congratulate herself constantly on her greatness. When the household prepares a lavish ball to honor a visiting prince and princess, the flowers buzz with anticipation over which among them will be chosen for the great house. Despite competition from confident azaleas certain of their own indispensability, the gardener selects Rosa Indica for the "place of honor," uprooting her and transplanting her into an enormous, ornate Sèvres vase within the mansion's frescoed banqueting hall. She is carried past her former neighbors—the Banksia and the blackbird—without a glance, glorying in her ascension and contemptuous of her past. In her towering blue-and-gold vase, Rosa Indica is admired lavishly by the household's children, and by the ladies, and even by a parrot who addresses her; though the jealous azaleas beneath her mutter that she was "only Rosa Damascena" not so long ago, and she cannot escape this taunting reminder of her true origin. Her supreme moment arrives when the visiting prince himself singles her out at dinner, praising her beauty and calling her a Niphétos, a title her hostess confirms without correction, allowing Rosa Indica to believe she has fully erased her humble past. The banquet is magnificent, filled with jewels, wine, and speeches in which the prince uses her as a symbol of love and purity, and she feels her exaltation is complete, worth every prior suffering and mutilation. But after the feast, the guests depart to dance elsewhere, and Rosa Indica is left alone beneath a blazing chandelier that she initially mistakes for the sun. Its heat scorches her hour after hour through the long night, while the revelry continues elsewhere and no one returns to admire or tend her. She grows faint from heat and the fumes of wine, aching with fatigue and isolation, and finds herself yearning for the cool, dark, humble nights of her old garden home, where the blackbird once slept and the Banksia bloomed cheerfully beside her. When dawn finally breaks, the household servants extinguish the chandelier's countless lights and throw open the windows to clear the air, letting in a killing frost. The bitter cold sweeps through the banqueting hall and settles around the rose, wrapping her in a deathly chill after the punishing artificial heat. Rosa Indica, weakened past recovery by the extremes of scorching light and sudden frost, collapses and dies in the abandoned, darkened hall, her petals shaken loose by a servant's careless hand the next morning. Back in the old garden, the small Banksia buds, still safely dormant and protected within their stems against the winter cold, murmur to one another that she got exactly what she wished for—she achieved greatness—and that this is how fate, or the gods, answer foolish, discontented prayers: by granting them, and thereby delivering the punishment the wisher's own vanity and ingratitude deserved.

By Ouida · First published 1893 · Genre: Allegory, Fable, Fairy Tale · 5,482 words

First lines

SHE was a Quatre Saison Rose-tree.

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The Ambitious Rose-Tree is listed on Textopian as a fable by Ouida, dated 1893 CE.

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science fiction · space opera · interplanetary adventure · alien worlds · extraterrestrial civilizations · cosmic mystery · lost knowledge · ancient secrets · future setting · planetary exploration · scientific speculation · action adventure

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