Our wild rose grows on through high summer. Spring’s big bloom is but a pink memory of scent with smiles. Everything is present for autumn in swelling hips with taut, shining skin. Everything is nothing, though, without the red flush of ripeness, and so a little world waits.
All through this season, the hips wear cooking-apple green, little noticed among other greens on green, though the plant is not unnoticed by sparrows and tits, which forage daily on the abundant aphids. The RSPB’s garden bird specialist once told us that wild rose, honeysuckle and ivy are the holy trinity of plants to grow in a garden for sparrows.
Only after the hips have turned red and the skins softened will birds feed on them. They appear to be a fruit of last resort, with many destined to darken and shrivel to husks. Am I surprised? The hips contain irritant fibres like sticky sisal string and have an aftertaste that dries the mouth.
A bird did once eat a rosehip here, though, and dropped the seed that became this plant a few metres from its parent. That older rose also blossomed, bore fruit and, had we lived in another age, would have killed my wife.
More than a decade ago, I trained its supple young shoots up the side of our shed, so successfully that its weight pulled over the leaning shed of Sandy. Its stems had grown thick and woody over time, studded with unkind thorns.
It was one of those thorns that raked the back of Sarah’s hand while sweeping in a session of winter gardening. Within days the swelling had reached her wrist and she was unable to make a fist. The nurse told her that, without medical intervention, the infection would have reached her heart.
A bloodless wound, a permanent scar. I cannot look at the new rose – or any rose – without eying its centimetre-long barbs and thinking of those who worked the land before; for them, “just a scratch” really could be a matter of life or death.
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