The Joyful Botanist: Time to smell the roses
Roses (Rosa spp.) symbolize love and beauty and come with a sharp reminder that often love and beauty can be painful. A rose by any other name will still prick your fingers, or so the old saying goes. Or does it?
Roses can be found blooming all around us in the late spring and summer in Western North Carolina.
There are the sweet-smelling old rose bushes at your grandma’s house and the bright and long blooming yet kind of boring and scentless ‘Knockout’ roses planted around too many commercial and residential landscapes across the country.
Many of the woods around us are filled with small, white fragrant blooms of the problematic multiflora rose (Rosa multiflora) native to large areas of China and Japan. This species was introduced to North America in the 1860’s as a rootstock for ornamental roses, but its spread into wild places really started in the 1930’s when the U.S. Soil Conservation Service began encouraging and promoting the planting of multiflora rose for erosion control and as living fences and hedges for livestock control.
This has become one of the most widespread and difficult invasive species to remove from the forest due to the strong arching canes armed with curved thorns that look like cat’s claws and the large number of viable seeds each plant produces each year.
There are two species of rose native to Southern Appalachia, the Carolina rose (Rosa caroliniana) and the swamp rose (Rosa palustris). Early on in my botanical education I asked an expert how to tell the difference between these two species, and they sarcastically responded, “swamp rose grows in a swamp…” While this sounded flippant at first, it turns out that habitat is an important way to tell these species apart. Carolina rose prefers dry soil, and swamp rose obviously prefers wet soil.
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Both species have large pink flowers with five petals and a yellow center. They are both also very fragrant. The scent of these native roses is enough to grab my nose and lead me around like a wolf in an old Tex Avery cartoon. These ancient roses smell like a fine perfume. Were someone wearing an actual perfume that smelled so sweet, I’d probably think they put on too much.
I tend to encounter the swamp rose much more frequently than I do the Carolina rose, although both are available to purchase and plant in your landscape from some of the wonderful native plant nurseries in our region. If you do plant some, don’t treat them like ornamental roses, though because these wild relatives will just not behave. Especially the swamp rose, they both spread themselves when planted in conditions they like by rooting arching branches and sending up shoots from spreading rhizomatic roots. They are both best planted where their natural habit will be allowed to fully express.
Rose flowers are edible and medicinal, and the ripe fruits called rose hips are loaded in vitamin c and make for a great tea. And when it comes to those fruits, the native rose hips don’t lie. They are large and numerous making them easy to harvest and process into tea or even chutney.
These native roses don’t just help feed humans, though. Their ample pollen and nectar are commonly foraged by bees, flies and moths. And both the swamp rose, and Carolina rose are the primary host to a native species of moth called Coptotriche admirabilis, who in their larval stage exist as leaf miners chewing their way through the inside of the rose leaf.
If you do happen across one of these native roses, I hope you do take time to smell them, for their fragrance is unmatched in the garden. Be careful if you do lean in close for a whiff, for if you get overwhelmed by the fragrance, you might fall in and get a nose full of thorns for your troubles as well.
(The Joyful Botanist leads weekly wildflower walks most Fridays and offers consultations and private group tours through Bigelow’s Botanical Excursions. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)
