Rose Trivia
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70 free Rose trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This trivia about rose quiz covers the flower from every angle. The first questions are botany: why rose 'thorns' are really prickles, which supermarket fruits belong to the rose family, why rose hips were once harvested for vitamin C, and where the oldest rose fossils were dug up. From there it moves into the human story of the rose: Empress Josephine's garden at Malmaison, the China roses that gave us repeat flowering, the first hybrid tea, the Peace rose smuggled out of France in 1939, and the genetically engineered blue rose that is really lavender. There are questions on rose oil and rose water (Bulgaria's Rose Valley, Iran's rose water harvest, how many flowers make a gram of attar), on rose symbolism (sub rosa, the Tudor rose, the White Rose resistance, the Labour rose) and on rose traditions like the Pasadena Rose Parade and Portland's Rose Festival. A final run of questions covers famous Roses and rose titles: Pete Rose, Derrick Rose, Axl Rose, Rose Nylund, Rose Tyler, Kiss from a Rose, The Name of the Rose and Citizen Kane's Rosebud. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries and each question shows its source, so you can settle arguments at a garden club, a pub quiz or a family game night.
30 of 70 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The saying 'a rose by any other name' comes from a speech by which Shakespeare heroine?
Juliet
Juliet: she argues that Romeo's surname, Montague, is no part of him, since the flower would smell as sweet whatever it was called.
Q 02The Rose Parade is held each New Year in which California city?
Pasadena
Pasadena: members of its Valley Hunt Club began the parade to show friends back east, buried in snow, that flowers bloomed there in midwinter.
Q 03In the traditional language of flowers, a red rose stands for what?
True love
True love: Victorians gave each bloom a meaning so a bouquet could say what etiquette kept them from speaking aloud, and guidebooks to the code sat in many homes.
Q 04Rose hips are especially rich in which vitamin?
C
C: few plants hold more of the vitamin than rose hips, which is why wartime Britain leaned on wild ones, boiled into the syrup long taken to top up levels.
Q 05Which of these fruits belongs to the rose family, Rosaceae?
Apple
Apple: like a rose hip, most of the flesh you eat is the swollen cup from the base of the flower, grown up around the core that holds the pips.
Q 06Rose gold gets its pink tint from alloying gold with which metal?
Copper
Copper: the more of it in the mix, the redder the metal, and the alloy was so fashionable in 19th-century Russia that it became known as Russian gold.
Q 07In double garden roses, the extra petals are converted versions of which part of the plant?
Stamens
Stamens: a wild rose has just five petals, and gardeners over centuries picked out the mutations that turn its pollen-bearing stamens into dozens more.
Q 08The rose is the national flower of which European country, a tradition from its 15th-century civil wars?
England
England: its emblem is a double rose, white set on red, devised to show the two warring houses joined by a royal marriage.
Q 09The sharp growths along a rose stem are commonly called thorns, but botanically they are what?
Prickles
Prickles: true thorns are modified stems, but a rose's hooks grow only from the stem's outer skin, which is why they can be snapped off so cleanly.
Q 10During the Wars of the Roses, a white rose was the badge of which royal house?
York
York: the rivalry crossed the Atlantic, where the Pennsylvania cities of York and Lancaster long fielded baseball teams called the White Roses and the Red Roses.
Q 11Which US city with a June Rose Festival has been called the City of Roses for over a century?
Portland, Oregon
Portland, Oregon: its test garden grew out of World War I, when breeders around the world began sending their new varieties to the city to be put on trial.
Q 12Derrick Rose became the youngest MVP in NBA history in 2011 while playing for which team?
Chicago Bulls
Chicago Bulls: his hometown team had landed him against the odds, winning the 2008 draft lottery with only a 1.7 percent chance at the first pick.
Q 13In Citizen Kane, the dying word 'Rosebud' turns out to be the name of what?
A childhood sled
Q 21Who wrote the 1980 medieval murder mystery The Name of the Rose?
Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco: a university professor of semiotics, he was nearing 50 when this debut made him a best-selling novelist around the world.
Q 22Which actress played Rose Tyler when Doctor Who returned in 2005?
Billie Piper
Billie Piper: her character is trailed all series by the words 'Bad Wolf', which she herself turns out to have scattered through time and space as a message.
Q 23Which French empress sponsored rose breeding at her gardens at Malmaison in the early 19th century?
Josephine
Josephine: Napoleon gave her that name, for until they met she had been known as Rose, and at Malmaison she gathered roses from around the world.
A childhood sled: the reporter gives up without an answer, and only the audience sees the name on the sled as workers feed Kane's unwanted belongings to a furnace.
Q 14Most wild rose species are native to which continent?
Asia
Asia: wild roses are native only to the Northern Hemisphere, so every rose growing south of the equator descends from plants that people carried there.
Q 15In ancient Greece the rose was most closely associated with which goddess?
Aphrodite
Aphrodite: in the Iliad she keeps the dogs off Hector's body night and day and anoints it with oil of roses so that his flesh will not be torn.
Q 16The Latin phrase 'sub rosa', literally 'under the rose', means what?
In secret
In secret: a rose hung or carved overhead at a banquet or meeting is said to have bound everyone beneath it to keep what they heard in confidence.
Q 17Which British political party adopted a red rose as its symbol in the 1980s?
Labour
Labour: under Neil Kinnock the party traded its old logo for the flower in a 1986 rebrand, borrowing an emblem that socialist parties on the Continent already used.
Q 18Every surface of a Rose Parade float must be covered in what?
Natural materials such as flowers
Natural materials such as flowers: the first entries were private carriages decked in blossom, and today's computer-run floats hide their machinery under petals, seeds and bark.
Q 19Seal's 'Kiss from a Rose' finally topped the US charts in 1995 after appearing in which film?
Batman Forever
Batman Forever: Seal had written the song in 1987, felt embarrassed by it and threw the tape in a corner; after the film it won the Grammys for Record and Song of the Year.
Q 20'Every Rose Has Its Thorn' was the only US number-one single for which glam metal band?
Poison
Poison: singer Bret Michaels wrote it in a laundromat on tour, after phoning his girlfriend and hearing a man's voice in the background.
Q 24Which US president signed the law that made the rose America's national floral emblem?
Ronald Reagan
Ronald Reagan: his 1986 signature settled an old contest in which Senator Everett Dirksen had campaigned for years to give the honour to the marigold instead.
Q 25After Rome's Christianisation, the rose became identified with which figure?
The Virgin Mary
The Virgin Mary: the link gave the rosary its name, from the Latin for a rose garden, the cycle of prayers offered to her being pictured as a garden or garland.
Q 26Which soccer tournament staged its final at the Rose Bowl stadium in 1994?
The FIFA World Cup
The FIFA World Cup: Brazil beat Italy there in the first final ever settled by a penalty shoot-out, which ended when Roberto Baggio put his spot-kick over the crossbar.
Q 27The fine hairs inside the fruit of a rose have long been used as what?
Itching powder
Itching powder: the stiff hairs packed around the seeds irritate the skin, which is also why foragers take care to scoop them out before eating the fruit raw.
Q 28Rose Nylund of The Golden Girls came from which fictional Minnesota farming town?
St. Olaf
St. Olaf: Betty White told Rose's tales of the town only after a swap, having first been offered Blanche while Rue McClanahan was offered Rose.
Q 29Repeat-flowering garden roses descend from plants brought to Europe in the 18th century from which country?
China
China: its long-cultivated garden roses flowered again and again, and once they reached Europe, where roses mostly bloomed once a year, breeders crossed them into most modern varieties.
Q 30Which king adopted the Tudor rose, combining red and white petals, after his marriage in 1486?
Henry VII
Henry VII: he had won the crown at Bosworth the year before, and marrying Elizabeth, daughter of the rival house, let him fuse the two claims in one badge.