The Irish Music Stories project explores Irish, Scottish, and other Celtic traditions. To accompany podcasts Shannon shares bite-sized essays and poems. This piece is bonus content from the Season 9 “IMS SIDEQUEST” (Episodes 81-86), written after the White House announced plans to pave over its historic rose garden, removing a big patch of living green space that houses vast population of pollinators and other invertebrates.
This is the story of how tyrants and sages bloom from the same soil. And how it takes a team (and timing) for humans and plants to transform.
Red Rose and White Lotus
(July 22, 2025)
The summer of 1485 was a busy time for English bees and their keepers. Pagans had loved honey bees from the moment they started coming in from Europe. And interest in bees surged as churches built up their congregations and needed huge supplies of beeswax candles.
The English–and English bees—also loved roses. Eleanor of Provence (the Queen of England for 36 years) had taken the white rose as her symbol back in 1236. Then the first Duke of York took it as his family’s badge in the mid 14th century. A hundred years later, the Yorks began fighting the red rose Lancaster family for control of the throne. At least 35,000 were drafted and killed over the 32-year Wars of the Roses.
While a few rich families carried out their own power struggles, wrecking havoc on their people and the landscape, rose petals, candles, and honey helped get people through: a bit of beauty, a bit of sweetness; candlelight at religious services; magical mead-soaked midsummer solstice celebrations. Anything to bring some cheer.
On August 22, 1485, as the roses were tucking into their late summer blooming cycles and the bees were taking advantage of the August pollen flows and recruiting a new generation of workers to weather the winter, Henry Tudor and his 7,000 men army killed the white rose King Richard III.
The poor exhausted civilians limped back to their rose gardens and candle-filled Sunday masses. And they admitted that while their freshly dead king had usurped the throne (by locking his nephews in a tower) and had, like many kings before him, executed his enemies, he’d also put some reforms in place that benefited commoners. So he hadn’t been all that bad. Still, people were so tired of the War of the Roses that they were happy enough with the change of leadership and the end of the battles.
The new King Henry VII restored political order and set up a tax system to improve roads and public works. His eldest son Arthur was primed to take over. But Arthur died at age 15. So when Henry VII died of tuberculosis, 15 year old goofy, sporty Henry Jr was crowned King Henry VIII.
Like other historic and modern figures who inherited and then squandered vast riches and power, Henry VIII inherited a prosperous, well ordered kingdom, which he ripped apart during his reign. He also ripped his subjects apart. He executed 70,000 in 38 years. Anyone who annoyed or challenged him. He was lewd, adulterous. He would have been intolerable on social media.
He spared his first wife Catherine. But because she was only able to conceive one surviving girl child, after 24 years of marriage and multiple miscarriages, he asked the Pope for a divorce. The Roman Pope said no. So Henry created his own English Church and appointed himself Supreme Head of the Church of England, He named his friend Thomas the Archbishop, and Thomas granted Henry his first divorce.
Henry would go on to behead his second wife, grieve the death of his third (with whom he had a male child who ended up being king for a minute before his firstborn Mary and then second child Elizabeth took over). Henry divorced his fourth wife, beheaded his fifth, and adored number six, until she wanted to become a Protestant. He preferred the Catholic faith, even after he’d established himself as the head of the English church, which led England to become a Protestant country.
But the church thing for him was about power. About having access to divorce his first wife, and about maintaining a patriarchal, hierarchical church.
Still, the Protestants were paining him. And Henry VIII became increasingly irritable. By age 50 he was riddled with leg ulcers and was medically obese. But he still had enough vitality to cut down critics, dismantle the government, and push politics and religion under one fat crown, calling any attempts to restrict his royal power contrary to God’s will.
Henry VIII held on to absolute power in his bones. Then he died of a bone infection in 1547.
When planting roses, gardeners often toss bone meal in the bottom of the hole. It gives an immediate boost of nutrients. Bone meal can also help lotus plants develop strong root systems.
India’s national flower, the lotus, grows in some places in England. But the lotus isn’t a beloved sacred symbol for the Brits the way it is for their former subjects in India. Hindus believe their God Brahama emerged from a lotus. Many of their deities are depicted on lotus flowers.
Buddhists say that when their prophet Siddhartha Gautama was born ( 200 years before Aristotle) seven lotus flowers bloomed. And then seven days after Prince Siddharta was welcomed into the garden of life, his mother died. His father supported him at the royal palace for 29 years. When Siddharta’s son was born, he left the newborn, and his cousin/wife, and his King/dad to live on the streets. He wanted to get a taste of humility and suffering. It took a while for his dad to get over that—he was disappointed that his son had chosen to do a walkabout instead of inheriting the throne. But he made peace with it once his son found enlightenment and founded Buddhism.
Most Indians eventually chose Hinduism over Buddhism. The practices are not terribly conflicting; but power hungry men still managed to use the name of religion to create clashes and keep different ‘castes’ segregated. But Siddhartha’s teachings and lotus plants took root in the Kingdom of Thailand. Today over 90% of Thai people are Buddhist, and believe the louts symbolizes transformation, the way it roots in muddy soil, and opens into large floating leaves; the way it sends up long stems with buds that flower during the day and close back into the mud at night.
Similar to the way that roses can grow out of a pile of manure, the white lotus symbolizes how beauty can emerge from ugly circumstances.
To guarantee survival, lotus plants produce a profusion of seeds every year. Some germinate quickly, some are eaten by wild animals, some fall into the water, some sit dormant for months. Some sit for hundreds of years. Then with the right water temperature, full sun, warm wet soil, and a few bees, butterflies, and beetles to carry lotus pollen from flower to flower, new plants can grow.
But it takes serendipity—it takes assistance for lotus seeds to germinate and develop into flowering plants. It also takes a team (and timing) for a human to transform from rich princes to unattached wise being of light. Or for a wealthy heis to turn into tyrants or a benevolent king.