(Feb 2016)  
 
.....where did they originate? Because some Rosas x centifolia were imported from Flanders and Holland into France and England in the 16th through 18th centuries, most rosarians and plantsmen have assumed the rose originated in the Low Countries. But that is a mere assumption. Not a species but a genetic mix, (hence the X in R. x centifolia), their ancestry appears to go back many, many centuries.
Since Roman times, say around 200 A.D., when Rome traded with Constantinople and Alexandria, that empire also frequented trade routes from Italian ports to the Low Countries. And Constantinople was connected to ancient land trade routes from China through Scythia (roughly Ukraine and southwest Russia today) and Bactria (roughly Afghanistan and parts of Iran). During the early Middle Ages, trade routes of the ninth and tenth centuries into Europe also led to Bruges (in today’s Belgium but then a part of Holland), which was one of the great trade cities known for its huge commercial fairs, as was Ypres, which rose to the height of its market prosperity in the 13th century. Antwerpen, too, was a main port city of the Spanish Netherlands in the 14th century, especially for Portuguese trade with its connections to the Far East. In sum, R. x centifolia in any of its stages of development to the cultivar it is today could have been borne along the Silk Road or by sea or both until it reached the Low Countries where it was further refined.
All that may seem to be conjecture, but we do have some very early evidence that points to the existence of the centifolia outside the Netherlands. The Zoroastrian scriptures of Persia, the Pahlavi Bundahishn, which date back as far as the ninth century, mention a “hundred-petalled rose.” Assuming that rose still exists, the reference could allude to the yellow R. hemesphaerica, since no color is given, but it just might refer to an early variety of centifolia. By 1307 Petrus de Crescentius, an Italian writer on horticultural and agricultural topics, mentioned a hundredpetalled rose growing in Batavia (the old name for Holland). Given the Silk Trade Route through Persia and Turkey and onward to Salerno in southern Italy, then north to the Low Countries, the centifolia rose may indeed have reached the Dutch by the very early 14th century.....
After that, we have no mention of the centifolia for over 200 years. In 1515-16, Abunasri Heravi of Persia writes of sixteen kinds of roses in his Ersad al-zera’a, among them the “yellow hundred-petalled rose” (no doubt R. hemisphaerica) and the “hundred-petalled red rose,” apparently R. x centifolia. ....
The next known reference to what we call the centifolia was made by Matthias de l’Obel, one of a trio of renowned Flemish botanists. In his Plantarum of 1576, he included among his 1,486 engravings one of the rose in question, which he thought was a damask. His description of it in his Kruydtboeck (Herbal Book) of 1581 is that of a centifolia. Obviously impressed by the rose, he adds that a gardener, N. Sanders in Antwerpen, gave him the rose, also remarking that others grew it—a woman near the town of Gorcum, and a Secretary Willem Martiny. Two years later the great botanist Clusius, another of the famous trio, mentions the cabbage rose in his 1583 edition of Horti Germaniae, and again in more detail in his 1601 edition. There he reports having received two Rosas centifolia batavica from a John Hoghelande, one which bloomed in 1591 with 120 petals, “approaching white somewhat.” He also reports that such a rose grows in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.