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70 free Rose trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This trivia about rose quiz covers the flower from every angle. The first questions are botany: why rose 'thorns' are really prickles, which supermarket fruits belong to the rose family, why rose hips were once harvested for vitamin C, and where the oldest rose fossils were dug up. From there it moves into the human story of the rose: Empress Josephine's garden at Malmaison, the China roses that gave us repeat flowering, the first hybrid tea, the Peace rose smuggled out of France in 1939, and the genetically engineered blue rose that is really lavender. There are questions on rose oil and rose water (Bulgaria's Rose Valley, Iran's rose water harvest, how many flowers make a gram of attar), on rose symbolism (sub rosa, the Tudor rose, the White Rose resistance, the Labour rose) and on rose traditions like the Pasadena Rose Parade and Portland's Rose Festival. A final run of questions covers famous Roses and rose titles: Pete Rose, Derrick Rose, Axl Rose, Rose Nylund, Rose Tyler, Kiss from a Rose, The Name of the Rose and Citizen Kane's Rosebud. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries and each question shows its source, so you can settle arguments at a garden club, a pub quiz or a family game night.
30 of 70 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the fruit of a rose plant called?
Hip
Many tightly petalled garden roses never form one because pollinators cannot reach inside the flower, so they are propagated from cuttings instead.
Q 02The Rose Parade is held every New Year's Day in which California city?
Pasadena
It runs mostly along a boulevard that was once part of Route 66, and has followed roughly the same route for decades.
Q 03In the traditional language of flowers, a red rose stands for what?
True love
Yellow is friendship, white innocence, orange passion and blue mystery, which is convenient given that a truly blue rose does not exist.
Q 04Rose hips are especially rich in which vitamin?
C
Wild hips can contain around 426 mg per 100 g, several times the concentration in an orange, which is why they are made into syrup, tea and jam.
Q 05Which of these fruits belongs to the rose family, Rosaceae?
Apple
The family also includes pears, plums, cherries, peaches, strawberries and almonds, which is why an apple blossom looks so much like a wild rose.
Q 06Rose gold gets its pink tint from alloying gold with which metal?
Copper
It was so fashionable in early 19th-century Russia that it was known as Russian gold; the more copper, the redder the alloy.
Q 07A wild rose flower, such as the dog rose, normally has how many petals?
Five
The lush, many-petalled look of garden roses comes from centuries of breeding; the ancestral flower is a simple five-petal disc.
Q 08The rose is the national flower of which European country, a tradition from its 15th-century civil wars?
England
The badge is a Tudor rose, red outside and white inside, and it still appears on the national rugby team's shirts.
Q 09The sharp growths along a rose stem are commonly called thorns, but botanically they are what?
Prickles
True thorns are modified stems, whereas a rose's hooks are outgrowths of the skin of the stem, which is why they snap off cleanly with a sideways push.
Q 10During the Wars of the Roses, a white rose was the badge of which royal house?
York
The rival red rose barely existed at the time; historians note the pairing was largely invented afterwards by the Tudor victor to sell himself as a peacemaker.
Q 11Which US city with a June Rose Festival has been called the City of Roses for over a century?
Portland, Oregon
The nickname was unofficial from 1888 and made official only in 2003; the city's rainy climate happens to suit roses perfectly.
Q 12Derrick Rose became the youngest MVP in NBA history in 2011 while playing for which team?
Chicago Bulls
He was 22 years and 7 months old, and had been drafted first overall by his hometown club after one season at Memphis.
Q 13In Citizen Kane, the dying word 'Rosebud' turns out to be the name of what?
A childhood sled
Q 21Who wrote the 1980 medieval murder mystery The Name of the Rose?
Umberto Eco
It was his debut novel; the 1986 film cast Sean Connery as the Franciscan detective William of Baskerville.
Q 22Which actress played Rose Tyler when Doctor Who returned in 2005?
Billie Piper
The former pop singer's character was haunted for a whole series by the words 'Bad Wolf', which she herself turns out to have scattered through time.
Q 23Which French empress sponsored rose breeding at her gardens at Malmaison in the early 19th century?
Josephine
Napoleon's first wife assembled the most famous rose collection of the age and had her plants recorded by the finest botanical painter of the day.
The reporter never finds out; the audience alone sees the object tossed into a furnace in the film's final shot.
Q 14Most wild rose species are native to which continent?
Asia
Only a handful of species are found wild in Europe and North America, and the group as a whole ranges right across the northern hemisphere.
Q 15In ancient Greece the rose was most closely associated with which goddess?
Aphrodite
In the Iliad she anoints Hector's body with the immortal oil of the rose, and later writers said the flower turned red when she pricked herself on its thorns.
Q 16The Latin phrase 'sub rosa', literally 'under the rose', means what?
In secret
Roman banquet rooms were carved with roses as a reminder that what was said there stayed there; its opposite is sub vino, loose-lipped under the vine.
Q 17Which British political party has used a red rose as its symbol since the late 1980s?
Labour
The red rose has stood for socialism since the 1880s, and the party swapped its old red flag for the flower under Neil Kinnock's rebrand.
Q 18Every surface of a Rose Parade float must be covered in what?
Natural materials such as flowers
Volunteers glue on petals, bark, seaweed, seeds and even vegetables in the final days before New Year's, one reason the floats smell as good as they look.
Q 19Seal's 'Kiss from a Rose' finally topped the US charts in 1995 after appearing in which film?
Batman Forever
Seal wrote it in 1987 and was so embarrassed by it that he threw the tape in a corner; it went on to win Record and Song of the Year at the Grammys.
Q 20'Every Rose Has Its Thorn' was the only US number-one single for which glam metal band?
Poison
Bret Michaels wrote it in a Dallas laundromat after phoning his girlfriend and hearing a man's voice in the background.
Q 24Which US president signed the 1986 law making the rose the national floral emblem?
Ronald Reagan
The proclamation was signed in the White House Rose Garden, ending a decades-long tussle in which the marigold had been the main rival candidate.
Q 25After Rome's Christianisation, the rose became identified with which figure, an association that produced the rosary?
The Virgin Mary
Dürer's 1506 painting The Feast of the Rosary shows her handing out garlands of roses, and rosary literally means a rose garden.
Q 26Which soccer tournament staged its final at the Rose Bowl stadium in 1994?
The FIFA World Cup
Brazil beat Italy on penalties there; the stadium later hosted the 1999 Women's World Cup Final and will stage the 2028 Olympic soccer finals.
Q 27The fine irritant hairs inside the fruit of a rose have long been used as what?
Itching powder
Hips are perfectly edible once the hairs are removed, and are best picked after a first frost has softened and sweetened them.
Q 28Rose Nylund of The Golden Girls came from which fictional Minnesota farming town?
St. Olaf
Betty White was originally meant to play Blanche and Rue McClanahan Rose, but the two swapped parts to avoid being typecast.
Q 29Repeat-flowering roses descend from Rosa chinensis, an 18th-century import from where?
China
European roses mostly bloomed once a year until these imports arrived; crossing them with tea roses eventually produced the modern hybrid tea.
Q 30Which king adopted the Tudor rose, combining red and white petals, after his marriage in 1486?
Henry VII
He had taken the crown at Bosworth the year before and married Elizabeth, daughter of the rival house, to fuse the two claims into one badge.