Wild Roses
THE ACCEPTED WISDOM on roses is forbidding: The Queen of Flowers requires royal treatment. She needs the richest soil, drip irrigation, and a bed of her own. She has expensive chemical dependencies. She must be pruned at a 45-degree angle as precise as the turning of a cup in a Zen tea ceremony. If the ritual isn’t done just right — poof! The luxurious shrub with its delicately poised flowers turns into a single spindly cane.
But North America’s native wild roses require no such pedestal. You can burn them, weed-whack them, step on them, and eat them, and they’ll continue to grow. They’re as at home growing by train tracks, on the edges of swamps, or in the frozen tundra as they are in the most effete garden. They’re so tough that the U.S. Department of Soil Conservation once tested some species for use in highway medians, finding that they could stop a car. And despite their bearishness, some of them possess the qualities that have made us obsess over the rose for the past several millennia — edible hips with eight times the concentration of vitamin x ), a scent so complex and tuned to our senses that it can be no more effectively recreated in a laboratory than chocolate or coffee can.
