The dog rose — Rosa canina is the most common wild rose in Britain and it's in flower in the hedgerows in June. It has pale pink five-petalled heads that can be seen peeking out of every lane and field edge from late May until July. It was first recorded botanically by William Turner in 1538, but people had been eating its fruit, using its roots, and giving it names for thousands of years before anyone thought to record its properties. Archaeological finds confirm that rosehips were eaten in Britain as early as 2,000 BC.
It is, in other words, one of the oldest relationships we have with any hedgerow plant and why there are so many stories about it.
Why it's called the dog rose?
The Latin canina means 'of dogs,' and the ancient Greeks are probably to blame as they believed that a medicine made from the root could cure a person bitten by a mad dog, a piece of lore that stuck around long enough to be preserved in the Latin name and passed into English. Another theory suggests the hooked thorns resemble dogs' teeth, which is less dramatic but arguably more likely if you've ever caught your sleeve on one!
The folk names are better. Vickery's Folk Flora records over sixty regional names for the dog rose and its fruit across Britain and Ireland, among them: brimmle, buckle-brier, horse-bramble, pig's nose, brandy bottles, pixy-pears, witches' briar, and herb patience. Each name a record of a different place, a different use, a different way of noticing the same plant.
The most common of these names is briar rose, which is the name given to a version of the story Sleeping Beauty, the version where the princess is hidden behind an impenetrable thicket of thorny roses.
The medieval riddle
There is an old country riddle or rhyme, which is probably from Medieval times, that was used to teach people how to identify the dog rose by its sepals, the five green parts that enclose the flower while it's still in bud:
Five brethren were born together,
Two had beards and two had none,
And the other had but half of one.
On the dog rose, two of the five sepals are finely haired, two are smooth, and the fifth has hair on one side but not the other. The riddle is a piece of practical botany captured in a verse, the kind of thing that was passed on from mother to daughter and designed to be easily remembered.
This is how plant knowledge survived for centuries before the printed herbals such as that of Culpeper and Gerrard.
What Culpeper said and didn't say
Nicholas Culpeper, who had something to say about almost every plant in England, thought it 'needless to trouble the reader' with a description of the rose, any rose, garden or wild, because everyone already knew what one looked like. He grouped them together in a single entry and moved on to their uses, which he considered considerably more interesting than their appearance.
He attributed the rose under the rule of Venus. He recommended the rosehips for their binding quality, the petals dried and powdered for headaches and sore eyes, and the water distilled from the flowers for inflammation. The dog rose was not a decorative plant in Culpeper's age, it was medicine growing in the hedges and as available to everyone.
The fairy connection
In Germanic folklore, the fruits of the dog rose were said to be used by fairies to make themselves invisible. In Celtic tradition, the dog rose flowers were associated with the boundary between the seen and unseen worlds, as can be seen in the name witches' briar, which was recorded in some counties and carries the same implication. This was a plant that grew in the hedgerow, which is in itself a boundary.
The rose in the June Almanac
The dog rose is one of the threads running through this month's Almanac box, and appears there in three different forms.
The wild English rose lip balm is made with rose 10ml, handmade in Cornwall, with the delicate fragrance of rose.
The summer tea blend is Pai Mu Tan white tea with rose petals, one of the least processed teas in the world, grown in the mountains of Fujian province in China, with rose buds added because it is peony and rose season right now.
A nightingale art print from an original painting in watercolour and gouache, inspired by the old Cornish folk song Sweet Nightingale. The nightingale and the rose have been paired in poetry, song, and folklore for as long as anyone has written either of them down.
The June Almanac box is open until Tuesday 10th June. One-off box: £20. Monthly subscription: £15.