A delightful place, a very pleasant situation. The metaphor was employed by English poets from Christopher Marlowe on. Today it is often used in a negative sense—that is, some situation is not a bed of roses. Indeed, the metaphor lacks literal truth anyway, as garden expert Allen Lacy pointed out in a New York Times column of 1987: “A bed of roses isn’t, considering all the fussy care they require—remove faded blossoms, minor pruning, spraying, dusting.”