If you have fragrant non sprayed roses, try making Rose Syrup
My neighbor make it from her grandmother's recipe from Liguria..
my mom loves it ( so do I) and we had it the other day at Casa Emma wineryon fresh ricotta.
I know sometimes it is available at whole foods in the states, but even here at her house.. Isabella runs out!
Enjoy!

"non-sprayed" being the most important thing. Unless your florist can certify the roses are organic I would only use those from your own garden. I use the roses from my garden for a multitude of culinary related things.
*Home-made Rose Jam is lovely on a scone with devonshire cream.
*I candy rose petals with superfine sugar to decorate sweet treats.
*Put rose petals into a jar of sugar to flavor it and always have on hand. (Same with a vanilla bean, lemon rind, cinnamon stick, etc)
*Petals make a nice addition to a summer salad but I actually prefer nasturtium petals as they have more of a peppery taste.
*A grilled sea bass with a rose petal glaze.
*Poached pears swimming in a rose scented creme anglaise.
I love to use flowers in the kitchen.

I don't do anything to my roses, they were there when I bought the house. Can I assumethey're safe since *I* don't put chemicals on them?

Most fertilizers and pesticides dissipate after time with rain, evaporation, etc. If you've had them for a couple of seasons or more without adding fetilizer to the soil or spraying pesticides on them I would go ahead and use them without any worry -- although to be completely sure you could start new plants.
I'm sure we're getting much more harmful things on the tomatoes and lettuce we buy at the market.

Unluckily not all the fragrant roses keep their fragrance once you cook them... my mother uses musk roses for making jam and it's great on gelato di crema!

I love to make rose liqueur, but I've never made it with the actual roses -- just Sadaf Rose Syrup from Global Foods.

I also use rose syrup in my Tokyo Rose liqueur.

Tokyo Rose:
Soak 1/2 cup crystalized ginger in 2 cups alcohol for a couple of weeks.
Strain and filter.
Add 2 cups sugar syrup.
Add just enough rose syrup to give the liqueur the color of pickled ginger.
Yum.

Deborah that sounds so intoxicatingly exotic.
I am definitely going to print this out and add to my stack of "Must-do's" just so I don't forget.

When I was a little girl by grandmother would wait until all the roses were close to being done blooming, pick all the petals, grind them up to this brown gluey consistancy and then we would roll them into beads, use a needle to pierce a string hole, let them dry and we would make necklaces that had the most wonderful fragrance. They would last amost until school started again. I had almost forgotten this ritual of summer. Right up there with making daisy crowns and hollyhock dolls.

Ginger

Ginger, I have a memory from when I was a little girl in California of picking snapdragon flowers, calling them snapdragon puppies, squeezing the petals together and pretending they could "bark".