The roses Maddie encounters in and around Ormaie represent hope, beauty, and innocence. This symbolism first shows up in the name of Julie’s Resistance circuit, which is known as the Damask Circuit. Like most Resistance circuits, it’s named for its oldest and most powerful member’s profession, which in this case happens to be growing roses. The Resistance is fighting to take down the Nazis, who have invaded France—an innately hopeful goal.
Both Anna Engel and the rose-grower position actual roses as symbols of innocence and beauty. In a conversation with Maddie, Engel notes that the square in Ormaie used to be filled with beautiful, blooming roses—but when the Nazis arrived, they tore all the roses out so they could park trucks and tanks in the square. To Engel, tearing out the roses in favor of tanks represents the Nazis’ immorality—they are, after all, willing to destroy innocent, beautiful things and replace them with symbols of oppression and violence. Engel and the rose-grower also liken Julie, who’s deceased at this point, to roses: Julie was beautiful, vivacious, and tortured senselessly to further the Nazi cause. So when the rose-grower buries Julie and the other deceased female prisoner in her rose garden and piles the gravesite high with damask roses, it further associates Julie with beauty and hope for a better future.
More broadly, the damask roses that the rose-grower is best known for cultivating bloom well into the winter, long past when most rose varieties have gone dormant. Her damask roses are, in this sense, a spot of beauty and hope during the darkest, coldest time of the year. They represent various characters’ hopes that the situation in Ormaie specifically, and Europe more broadly, will improve—that spring will come, the Nazis will be defeated, and life will once again be beautiful.
Damask Roses Quotes in Code Name Verity
Her gardens are full of roses—sprawling, old tangled bushes, quite a few of them autumn-flowering damasks with their last flowers still nodding and drooping in the rain. […] The flowers are sodden and dying in the December rain, but the sturdy bushes are still alive, and will be beautiful someday in the spring, if the German army doesn’t mow them down like the ones in the Ormaie town square.
“They let us bury everyone at last,” she told me. “Most are up there by the bridge. But I was so angry about those poor girls, those two lovely young girls left lying there in the dirt for four days with the rats and the crows at them! It’s not right. It is not natural. So when we buried the others I had the men bring the girls here—”
Julie is buried in her great-aunt’s rose garden, wrapped in her grandmother’s first Communion veil, and covered in a mound of damask roses.
Damask Roses Symbol Timeline in Code Name Verity
