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.
