What does a rose look like?

How to draw an owl is a post by the author, entrepreneur, and marketing extraordinaire Seth Godin that got me thinking about how often I wonder about how to  draw roses. They are so beautiful. Everyone goes crazy for them. People obsess over them and they get poems and songs written about their delicate beauty. A whole holiday is practically devoted to them.  They are so omniscient that they are actually not my favourite flower.  There are just too many cartoonish versions of them to like that much.  However, every once in a while, I get the pleasure of coming across one in a natural setting and they wow me once again.

I have tried drawing roses many many times over the years.  I'm not an artist, but still, I usually am able to draw a roughly drawn facsimile of most things, just not roses.  What do they really look like? I get too focused on drawing each petal, and can't seem to draw the petals all together. What does a rose consist of?  I could draw a line in a circle and another one and another one after that, but would it be a rose? I could even trace an artist's sketch of one and I might not really understand or convey the underlining principle of roses. How about you? Do you know how to draw a rose?

This is not a rose, but some other kind of flower, I could not draw it either.  Flowers are so tricky.