Dog Rose

Overview

The dog rose is the original rose — the wild ancestor, or at least the wild cousin, of every perfumed cultivar that has been bred and coaxed into florists' windows and formal gardens over the past two thousand years. It grows in hedgerows and scrub with a casualness that the cultivated rose, for all its generations of refinement, cannot manage — arching through hawthorn and elder and blackthorn with five-petalled, pale pink flowers that smell simply and unmistakably of rose, without the heaviness of the bred varieties. In autumn the hips ripen to scarlet — smooth, oval, gleaming — and persist through winter, food for fieldfares and redwings when little else remains. The hips contain more vitamin C per gram than virtually any other common food plant. This was not discovered until the Second World War, when blockades interrupted citrus supplies and the Ministry of Food sent children into hedgerows to gather them.

Botanical Notes

A vigorous, arching, deciduous shrub reaching 1–3 metres, with strong, hooked thorns and pinnate leaves of 5–7 leaflets. Flowers are five-petalled, pale to deep pink or white, from May to July, with a simple, clean scent. Fruits — hips — are smooth, oval, scarlet to orange-red when ripe in September to November, each containing numerous hairy seeds (the hairs inside the hip are the classic itching powder of childhood). Found in hedgerows, woodland margins, scrub, and roadsides throughout Europe. The hips contain ascorbic acid (vitamin C), carotenoids, flavonoids, and tannins; the seeds contain fatty acids with anti-inflammatory activity studied in preparations for osteoarthritis.

Lore & History

The dog rose appears in the earliest English herbal tradition — it is the rose of Chaucer, of medieval illuminated manuscripts, of the Tudor rose emblem that combined York's white rose and Lancaster's red (both Rosa species). The "dog" in dog rose is variously explained as meaning "common" (as in dog violet, dog daisy — the unfancy version) or as preserving the ancient belief that the root could cure the bite of a mad dog. In the language of flowers, the wild rose means simplicity and poetry, as distinct from the cultivated rose's passion. In folk magic, rose hips and petals were used in love preparations and protective sachets — the thorns for warding, the hips for fertility and abundance. The rosary — the prayer beads — is said to have originally been made from pressed rose petals, which would make the name literal.

Warnings