Wild roses

Bill Meek takes a look at the wide variety of wild roses commonly found in our county’s fields and hedgerows.

Between May and July, Lincolnshire’s hedgerows, woodland edges and scrubby field corners are adorned with the abundant and beautiful flowers of wild roses. Although they have a modest place in the ancestry of our showy cultivated roses, our wild roses all have much simpler, white or pink, five-petalled flowers. Their rose scent may be present but is often faint and fleeting.

For botanists, wild roses present an identification quagmire. They may hybridise in almost any combination and many hybrids are fertile. In a unique additional twist, many of our wild roses inherit fewer chromosomes from their male than from their female parent, which means that when hybridisation occurs, it matters which parent is which.

As one might imagine, this is all a recipe for some bewildering variation, and some very confusing individual wild roses.

Different types
Despite all this, we can still pick out some of the “good” basic types along our Lincolnshire byways.

Genetically by far the simplest of our roses, with a refreshingly straightforward single set of chromosomes inherited from each parent, is the beautiful, white-flowered Field Rose.

The Field Rose is common enough with us, and identified by the female parts – in the centre of the flower – being fused into a column. The low, slightly greyish stems of the Field Rose are often tinged wine red on one side.

Our most widespread wild rose by far is the familiar Dog Rose, whose relatively large flowers can vary from white through to pale pink. It is usually to be found clinging to some other plant for support, and in woodland situations can sometimes be found flowering profusely way above the ground.

A slightly less robust plant, with its more two-tone petals a richer, deeper pink at their tips is my personal favourite, the Sweetbriar – the ‘eglantine’ of Shakespeare. While the flowers have the characteristic rose smell, in this species the foliage is also scented; not of roses, but perhaps surprisingly, of apples. This apple smell comes from a myriad of little glands on the leaf’s surface, which also make it slightly sticky to touch. On a damp, still day, the smell of apples can be detected several feet away from the plant.

Although the fragrant petals of some of our introduced roses may be collected and used for Turkish delight or rose jelly, it is the red fruits of our wild, native roses – rosehips – which are the parts generally collected for human consumption.

Children of my generation and earlier would scrape out the hairy seeds from the insides of rosehips and use them as “itching powder” – yet another once-ubiquitous custom that has now all but disappeared, although perhaps that is no bad thing.

The red flesh which remains is the main ingredient for rosehip syrup – exceptionally rich in vitamin C – which, similarly, is a taste etched into the memory of anyone above a certain age!

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