| Rose
Hips
1 September
2005
 They
are wonderfully useful seed packets. Rose hips
are good for you, make a fine syrup and are
extremely irritating when the hairy seeds are
craftily slipped between your shirt and bare
back during class.
The best known hip is that of
the wild rose, Rosa canina better known as the
dog rose. The tough skinned, urn shaped, orange-red
hips ripen early and by October have fallen
prey to hungry birds.
My favourite rose hip is the
big, fat, tomato- like fruit of Rosa rugosa.
As it ripens it turns from bright orange to
a deep, dull red. The large, single flowers
are available in white and shades of pink and
mauve. A favourite food for birds they can,
like other fruit, look untidy when half eaten.
The
small, pale orange hips of bush, climber and
shrub roses often look pathetic and that is
how it should be. That you have noticed them
in your garden means that you are not dead heading
your roses. This will result in a loss of flowers
and a weaker plant.
 For
style it is difficult to beat Rosa moyesii.
It forms a 10 ft high shrub and in late summer
is plastered with large, bright red, flask shaped
hips. The variety R.m. ‘Geranuim’
produces bright orange-red fruit of the same
attractive shape.
Rosa glauca has reddish green
stems and attractive, greyish purple foliage.
The single, cerise pink flowers are followed
by spherical bright red hips in autumn in sufficient
quantities to bend the branches.
Rosa ‘Empress Josephine’
is properly named Rosa x francofurtana and is
not easily found in garden centres.The semi-double,
deep pink flowers appear in early summer and
are followed by deep red, cone shaped hips.
 The
Incense rose, Rosa primula has aromatic, fern-like
foliage and single, primrose-yellow flowers
in late spring followed by small, cone-shaped
purple-maroon fruit.
Scotland has its own rose, Rosa
pimpinellifolia (Scots rose, Burnet rose).Early
summer, creamy-white flowers are followed by
masses of small, spherical, blue-black fruit.
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