Rosa virginiana Seeds | Virginia Rose
LATIN NAME: Rosa virginiana
COMMON NAME: Virginia Rose, Common Wild Rose
Plant Profile
The prickles are outgrowths of the epidermis and cortex rather than modified leaves, and they break away at the base without tearing a strip of stem. That is what makes a wild rose easier to handle than a barberry, whose spines are whole leaves and leave a wound behind when they are pulled. Here they are straight and slender, dense on the flowering shoots and sparser on the new canes.
A rose hip is not a berry. It is a swollen hypanthium, a cup of fused floral tissue that closes over the true fruits, the small hard achenes inside. Rosa virginiana ripens round hips to a clear red and holds them all winter, and each achene has a lignified pericarp that imposes physical dormancy, so water cannot reach the seed until weather has broken the coat down.
Roses are among the more accommodating woody plants on the tissue-culture bench. A nodal explant with one axillary bud will break and multiply on a mineral salt medium with a cytokinin such as benzyladenine, and rose tissues also form somatic embryos from leaf or petiole callus. For a suckering species, culture is the way to hold a selected clone true.
Breeders chasing roses that survive continental winters keep returning to the hardy wild species of North America and Asia. The Virginia rose contributes cold hardiness, a strong suckering root system and foliage that sheds black spot spores more readily than a soft leaf, and it flowers freely on young wood.
Gardeners planting beside a salted road or on a coastal plot get far more from this species than from a hybrid tea. It takes salt-laden wind, tolerates sand and needs no spraying where the air moves.
Science & Biotechnology
The autumn display is a strong argument for planting it: the compound leaves pass through orange into a deep, saturated red. The pigments are carotenoids that were in the leaf all season, unmasked as the chlorophyll breaks down, and the show is markedly better in full sun.
The scent of a fresh flower rests on the same volatile family as garden rose oil: citronellol, geraniol and nerol, with the rose oxides supplying the sharp, green-metallic note of a real rose. The hips carry ascorbic acid, ellagitannins and carotenoid pigments, which puts the species in the jam pan as well as the border.
Uses & Benefits
The species is easiest to place by the combination of glossy leaflets, single flowers in open clusters, and a hip that narrows at the neck. The flowers open in early summer, five broad pink petals around a ring of yellow stamens, each with a light, sweet scent rather than the heavy damask perfume of the old garden roses.
In the kitchen the hips are simmered, mashed and strained into a jelly with a tart, apple-like edge; halve them and remove the seeds and fine hairs first, In the landscape it makes a dune binder and a low wildlife hedge, and birds strip the hips in late winter.
Growing from Seed
Where Rosa virginiana grows wild, the wind arrives loaded with salt and the ground is thin, acidic and short of water. The leaflets are thick and glossy under a heavy cuticle, and the stomata sit in shallow pits beneath them, so the plant holds moisture far better than a soft-leaved garden rose in the same position. Each leaf carries five or seven finely toothed leaflets on a prickly rachis, and the slender red-brown stems arch outward and root where they touch bare sand.
Take the hips when they are fully coloured, split them and wash the achenes free of pulp and hairs. Sow into a sandy, fast-draining mix, about two parts coarse grit to one part loam and one part leaf mould, pressing each achene in to roughly its own thickness. Water once and leave the container outdoors through the winter so the coats are weathered; a cold frame suits the species better than a windowsill.
Wait until each seedling has three to five true leaves before pricking it into its own pot, Set plants into the garden a metre to a metre and a half apart, at the same depth as in the pot, in full sun and free-draining ground. Damp, crowded positions still bring rust and powdery mildew, so cut out old canes at the base to keep the thicket open.
Our Take
I plant the Virginia rose where nothing else will hold: a sandy bank above a driveway, a strip beside a salted lane. For the same effect in a smaller plant, the burnet rose (Rosa pimpinellifolia) makes a compact thicket with black hips, the swamp rose (Rosa palustris) suits a wet hollow, and the dog rose (Rosa canina) carries the wild-hedge look onto alkaline ground. The same thorny, bird-feeding temperament belongs to the hawthorn (Crataegus monogyna).
Related Reading
Gardeners who grow Virginia Rose often pair it with these related subjects: