Sweet-briar

Chris and I had an unexpected but very pleasant walk round King's Dyke nature reserve this afternoon. The sun shone and it was pleasantly warm, so we decided not to spend time in the hide, but strolled round the nature trail admiring the plentiful rose-hips and discussing the finer points of rose and bramble taxonomy (such a pair of geeks!)

This sweet-briar Rosa rubiginosa is perhaps one of the more distinctive roses, partly because of the copious glands on its stalk and the long-lasting, erect sepals, but perhaps mostly because of the strong fruity-apple scent of the foliage, which can be smelt from some distance away particularly when the weather is hot. 

This species was known to Shakespeare and appears in a Midsummer's Night Dream under the alternative name of eglantine.

 I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine:
There sleeps Titania sometime of the night.


Although he knew his flowers, I think his grasp of ecology may have been a little hazy. Oxlips, violets and woodbine (honeysuckle) are all woodland species, but sweet-briar is normally a species of chalk downland and other dry sites, including brownfield land, though its natural distribution has been blurred by widespread amenity planting. Rather paradoxically, the most frequent roses to be found in woodland are the field-rose Rosa arvensis, or the dog-rose Rosa canina.