The Rose of El Queremal: A Not-So-Modern Love Story
Posted in Interesting Plant Stories on March 3, 2014 by Annie Virnig
Annie Virnig is a graduate student in the Commodore Matthew Perry Graduate Studies Program at The New York Botanical Garden.
“The beauty of this species is its undoing,” wrote New York Botanical Garden botanist James Luteyn in 1983 regarding this flower, which is native to the Andean cloud forests of Colombia. Since then, his words have only become truer.
The founders of El Queremal in southwestern Colombia were inspired to name the town in honor of this beautiful and intoxicatingly fragrant flower that grows there, called quereme de la rosa by locals and known scientifically as Cavendishia adenophora.
Long before settlers reached El Queremal, the indigenous people of the area, the Anaconas, valued quereme de la rosa and believed it to be a charm for love and enchantment. The story goes that if a woman wears the quereme flower, its beautiful fragrance will inspire men to fall in love with her and women to be drawn to her in friendship. Likewise, if a man wears the flower in his lapel, women will flock to him. One story told in El Queremal involves a man who could not rid himself of the women who pursued him after he wore the quereme, so he ran away to live the rest of his days deep in the rainforest.