Roses For The Pantry

Anyone who aims for even a small measure of self sufficiency must turn their attention, eventually, to what nature has to offer to the medicine cabinet. Although I have been working on planting medicinal herbs, one thing that is missing from my garden is a good rose for rose hip production. Although I have over twenty roses in my garden, they are all hybrid teas and floribundas and none of them are particularly known for producing reliable crops of hips.

Rose hips are higher in vitamin C than citrus and can be dried and then made into a tea to fend off colds. A lot of people make other interesting things out of them like jams, jellies, syrups, and apparently some people in Sweden make a soup out of them. I'll pass on the soup. Roses are used for many other medicinal purpose as well such as an astringent agent for skin, a mild laxative, and also for healing minor cuts and bruises.

My yard is filled with these fat bastards right now. I just called him a fat bastard because it's the first thing that leaped to my mind. However, in spite of the fact that suddenly running into one of these guys' webs can make me scream like a little girl, I am thankful for all the hard work they do in my garden. Thank you, meaty beastie. (I took this picture for M. Sinclair Stevens.)


Now is the time to start planning your bare root orders for things like roses, fruit trees, and bushes. I have come up with this small list of types of roses known to be good for hip production (also known to produce good tasting hips):

Rosa Rugosa
Rosa Canina
Rosa Eglanteria
Rosa Californica

Philip likes the single roses like the dog rose so I may choose one variety from the "Rosa Canina" group. (I admit I like the way "dog rose" sounds rolling off the tongue like a pithy bark). Unfortunately, "Rosa Canina" is proving to be very difficult to find in catalogs. I am not as partial to single roses, I prefer the exuberance and excesses of the fully double roses.

Here are a few specific roses I have my eye on:

Rosarie De L'Hay
Blanc Double De Coubert
Hansa
Catherine Seytan

Many people believe roses are a fussy flower to grow. Those many people would be terribly misinformed. In spite of roses being susceptible to a few diseases such as black spot, giving the plants a healthy environment to grow in (good air circulation, healthy soil, plenty of nutrients) they will be healthy and able to withstand bouts of black spot and mildew, another famous rose ailment. If you're growing hybrid teas you will have more difficulty with these issues and also will have to prune them back in the winter quite a bit.

Have you ever been interested in growing roses that require almost no pruning, that are exceptionally disease resistant (and don't like being sprayed with chemicals), have good fragrance, and produce hips for you? Rugosas are the roses for you! Those first three roses on the above list are all rugosas. Another bonus? They are very hardy so do well in colder regions.

I suppose I'm beginning to sound like a smarmy salesperson, eh? I have nothing to gain from trying to convince you to grow roses, or to grow MORE roses except the satisfaction that your enjoyment of your garden will be enhanced by them. We once had a misogynistic-idiot neighbor who objected to his wife planting any more roses in their garden because he regarded them as frivolous. (They only had two of them. He thought he could get Philip to agree with him and Philip disappointed him by asking "what's not to like about roses?". He automatically thought that our overabundance of them was because of me and my frivolity, it never occurred to him that Philip loved our roses as much as I did.)

I can tell you I won't be sharing my scurvy-syrup* with anyone who damns themselves by calling roses "frivolous".