The white rose is the pale-flowered form of the cultivated rose (Rosa), and its symbolism turns on its colour: whiteness has made it, across European tradition, the flower of purity, innocence and spiritual love, as against the passion of the red. In Christian devotion the white rose is an emblem of the Virgin Mary, the rosa mystica, and the very word rosary records a garland of roses offered to her in prayer. The rose was sacred to Venus in the classical world, and Culpeper accordingly placed roses under that planet, the ruler of love and beauty.
The white rose most often meant in older herbals and heraldry is Rosa alba, a hardy, sweetly scented old garden rose distinct from the wild dog rose and from the modern hybrid tea, its exact parentage still debated by rose historians though it is thought to combine Rosa damascena with a wild ancestor. Distilled rosewater and the concentrated oil called attar or otto of roses, produced above all in Bulgaria's Rose Valley near Kazanlak since Ottoman times, carried the flower's fragrance into perfumery and cookery, and in the Islamic world into the ceremonial washing of the Kaaba in Mecca, a genuine ritual use recorded by pilgrims and historians of the site.