A rose garden or rosarium is a garden or park, often open to the public, used to present and grow various types of garden roses, and sometimes rose species. Most often it is a section of a larger garden. Designs vary tremendously and roses may be displayed alongside other plants or grouped by individual variety, colour or class in rose beds. Technically it is a specialized type of shrub garden, but normally treated as a type of flower garden, if only because its origins in Europe go back to at least the Middle Ages in Europe, when roses were effectively the largest and most popular flowers, already existing in numerous garden cultivars. Of the over 150 species of rose, the Chinese rosa chinensis has contributed most to today's garden roses; it has been bred into garden varieties for about 1,000 years in China, and over 200 in Europe It is believed that roses were grown in many of the early civilisations in temperate latitudes from at least 5000 years ago. They are known to have been grown in ancient Babylon Paintings of roses have been discovered in Egyptian pyramid tombs from the 14th century BC Records exist of them being grown in Chinese gardens and Greek gardens from at least 500 BC. Many of the original plant breeders used roses as a starting material as it is a quick way to obtain results. Most of the plants grown in these early gardens are likely to have been species collected from the wild. However, there were large numbers of selected varieties being grown from early times; for instance numerous selections or cultivars of the China rose were in cultivation in China in the first millennium AD. The significant breeding of modern times started slowly in Europe from about the 17th century. This was encouraged by the introduction of new species, and especially by the introduction of the China rose into Europe in the 19th century. An enormous range of roses has been bred since then. A major contributor in the early 19th century was Empress Josephine of France wh
