“Dog roses,” they called them through all recorded time, disparagingly, as a rose that is ‘worthless in comparison with cultivated roses like the Damascus (R. Damascena) or old breeds of Gallica (R. Gallica), just like they would in the 18th century refer to “dog Latin” as a debased form of language.
Poets celebrate sweet briars with leaves with the glands on their undersurfaces and edges that carried scents of green apple and grape, and wrote of “canker blooms” in the same lush hedges in which grew eglantine–all beauty and no truth, Shakespeare opined in Sonnet 54:
The canker blooms have full as deep a dye
As the perfumèd tincture of the roses,
Hang on such thorns, and play as wantonly
When summer’s breath their maskèd buds discloses;
But, for their virtue only is their show,
They live unwooed and unrespected fade,
Die to themselves …
Kinder thoughts perhaps came from “Albertus Magnus (ca. 1200—1280), a Dominican friar and plant hunter who became bishop of Regensburg and an early authority on soil fertility,” who might have authored a riddle which, if not only about the dog rose, at least acknowledged it:
“On a summer’s day, in sultry weather
Five Brethren were born together.
Two had beards and two had none
And the other had but half a one.“
“The Five Brethren,” trans. Edward A. Bowles, cited in [Bernhardt 1999: 13]
What am I?
I am the 5 sepals of the dog rose, two with whiskered edges, two without [“two had beards and two had none”], and the 5th with one whiskery and one smooth edge.
“Many versions of this riddle are found in Latin, English, and German,” Peter Bernhardt tells us. “It’s older than Europe’s first printing press.” At the Hildesheim Cathedral in Germany, it’s the “thousand year rose”: Tausendjähriger Rosenstock, as the rose bush that grows on the Church’s apse is thought to be as old as its name says.
The root of the dog rose was, it’s also told, “in classical times, thought to cure the bite of a mad dog” [Knowles 2005: 302]. The witches briar, it was, rose sauvage, the French say églantine but really it’s not; the leaves have no fragrance and the pale pink-to-white flowers (I gather) just a light one.
If there is ambivalence in all this, not so in the poems of Robert Burns: “O my Luve’s like a red, red rose, / That’s newly sprung in June”–and Colin Will of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh is convinced that Burns cannot have been referring in 1794 to the red rose cultivars introduced from China some years later [1798 at the earliest], but only to the dog rose’s vivid red buds [which lighten to pink-whites as the flowers bloom and age] abundant in Ayrshire hedgerows. A commemorative stamp issued in 1996 makes the specific botanical connection clear; see the image above (bottom right).
Getting to know the dog rose
Properly, Dog roses are 20–30 species and subspecies forming the Caninae section of the genus Rosa, with varying shapes and fragrances and colors, native to Northern and Central Europe, parts of western Asia, and North Africa. Elgantines [Rosa rubiginosa L.] are just a more sought-after variety–which may also explain the “red red” of Burns’ famous line and the fact that eglantines and dog roses are often confused with one-another–though they have famously become among the worst weeds in New South Wales, where they were introduced at the end of the 19th century as ornamentals.
These are deciduous shrubs, growing in dry woodland margins, disturbed areas like roadsides, on moist north-facing slopes as on dry dunes, and as high up as 2800m on Israel’s Mount Hermon. Dog roses will grow to heights of 1-3m or taller if given support. Its thorns are hooked: a climbing aid. Its hips are characteristically oval, elongated, and a deep red-orange. Along with the far more desired (and often confused) eglantines, dog roses act as invasives, colonising even, but only “cemetery fences, hedgerows bordering plowed land, and roadsides” [Bernhardt 1999: 218]. They appear to fertilize themselves, having not much need for companionship. “Charles Darwin was right when he noted that nature abhors continual self-fertilization,” Bernhardt remarks wryly, “We’ve wiped out plenty of plant species through greed and pure ignorance, but I suspect we will always have dog roses” [1999: 219-220].
Down to the hips!
Sepals, petals, roots, hedgerows–but who’s talking about the dogrose hips?
I didn’t myself come at a time when any roses were blooming, but the hips seemed to me every bit as alluring as any blowsy blossom, and perfectly attuned to the fall and coming Christmas season, quite late-season berry-like in their own ways.
It was November and rose hips had set plentifully everywhere, with often very distinct colors, shapes, and personalities. Here are several I found growing around Roomolenstraat in Amsterdam, though I have not expended the effort to try to work backwards, as I did with the dog rose, from hips to botanical identification.
Confiture et thé des dunes
I found the dog rose hips you see in this post as a dune plant, at the edge of the Dunes Boisées or the Pine dunes, alongside “thorn thickets” where blackthorn, hawthorn, sea buckthorn and maybe other similar plant markers of the Dunes Arbustives, the shrub dunes, proliferate. Going only by their sheer, striking beauty and the knowledge that rose hips are generally vitamin C power houses–though the commemorative stamp above is clear indication of a long history of medical uses not limited to just cold and influenza treatments–we collected enough to make a small jam and a few batches of warming tea.
The process is exactly as I followed for the Arbutus berry jam: boil the hips, strain out the pulp, add sugar, boil till a small amount mounds.
Add some hot water to the about-to-be-discarded rose hips, and strain out what will by then be a thinner extract. Add a little honey and an extra spoon of the jam maybe, and that’s a tea.
The easiest foraging-to-table ever.
Sources
- Bernhardt, Peter. 1999. The Rose’s Kiss: A natural history of flowers. Covelo, CA: Shearwater Books
- Elizabeth Knowles (2005). “Dog”. The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press
- Vedel, Helge and Johann Lange, 1958. Trees and bushes in wood and hedgerow. London: Methuen. p. 78
