![]() ![]() ![]() These roses can be burned as part of meadow maintenance or weed-whacked to the ground. Among our wild roses are repeat-bloomers, climbers, dwarfs, groundcovers, and cabbage roses - types that are carefree in virtually any landscape, from bayou swamp to arctic tundra. Along with about 18 other wild roses native to North America, it’s part of perhaps one of the world’s most important gene pools for rose gardeners and hybridizers. Nicknamed “Rose of America” during an expedition funded by French King Louis XVI, the prairie rose ( Rosa setigera) produces fragrant clusters of about 15 flowers and rose hips with some of the highest concentrations of vitamin C of any fruit - potentially even higher than citrus. Our original national flower is another story. But hybridization robbed them of their fruit, their rampant vigor, and often their fragrance. Such intensively hybridized roses, as different from their Asian and European wild rose relatives as a Shih Tzu is from a wolf, make peerless bouquets. Our collective image of a rose is of jawbreaker-sized blooms on long stems, cut from plants on perennial life support. Fewer would describe small, five-petaled, fragrant flowers and dense panicles of edible winter fruits. If asked to describe the rose, our national flower, few would answer that it’s one of the most indestructible plants in nature. ![]()
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