Coming Up Roses

The accepted wisdom on roses is forbidding: The Queen of Flowers requires the richest soil, drip irrigation, and a bed of its own. She has expensive fertilizer dependencies. She must be pruned at precise 45-degree angles, and if not cared for just right — poof — the luxurious shrub with its delicate flowers turns into a single spindly cane.

North America’s native wild roses need no such pedestal. You can burn them, weed-whack them, step on them, and eat them. They’re equally at home growing by train tracks, on the edges of swamps, or in frozen tundra as in the most pampered garden. They’re so tough that the U.S. Department of Soil Conservation once tested them