The Rose

All along the paths of the Silk Road, wherever irrigation permits, roses grow, and May is the month of roses. In Hotan (once Khotan) at the edge of the Taklimakan desert, for instance, all the people of the town still get together to harvest their roses; the petals are turned into wine. To the west there is Ashkhabad, about 30 miles from the Iranian border in what is now Turkmenistan. It was the western meeting place along a number of caravan routes, and although it lay beside the Kara Kum desert, intelligent irrigation had made it fertile. It grew crops from wheat to melons. And the people of Ashkhabad loved roses, as an English traveler named Stephen Graham discovered in May 1914.