EGLANTINE
Gardening is equal parts science, poetry, spirituality and dirt-under-the-fingernails. I was struck by the poetry part several weeks ago when I read a passage in Elizabeth Lawrence’s book gardening for Love. Ms. Lawrence mentions references in old southern market bulletins to a rose called “sweetbriar.”
“Sweetbriar is the poet’s eglantine, Rosa eglanteria,” she says, “which was brought to this country in the early days, and is now naturalized in the East.”
I have often this rose mentioned in literature and old garden narratives, sometimes spelled “sweetbrier” and sometimes “sweetbriar.” The references piqued my curiosity.
Naturalists Roger Torrey Peterson and Margaret McKenney describe the shrub in their field guide, Wildflowers: Northeastern/North central North America (1968) as follows:
“Sweetbrier.” Alien. Long, arching stems bear numerous pink flowers, smaller than those of most other roses. Leaves fragrant. Leaflets roundish, double-tooth. 4-6 feet. Roadsides, clearings. May-July.”
This description doesn’t really give the eglantine, sometimes also known as Rosa rubiginosa, its due. As with the elegant Rosa glauca, the clear pink, scented flowers are quite small, 1-2 inches wide and have only five petals each. The distinguishing feature of the eglantine and its hybrids is the pronounced scent of the leaves, which smell like apples. The plants ramble freely and the exceptionally prickly canes can reach 12 feet in length. Rosarian Peter Beales recommends clipping garden varieties every year to encourage luxuriant new growth. Naturalized in a hedgerow and left to its own devices, an eglantine will ramble freely but groups of them can also be deliberately planted as single-species hedges and clipped into a formal appearance. Blooms appear only once a year, but like many species roses, the eglantine produces bright red hips
Eglantines and other roses are descended from the first flowering plants that appeared over two hundred million years ago. They are native to Europe and western Asia and have rambled into literature many times over the centuries. Chaucer bestowed the name “Madame Eglantine” on the Prioress in his Canterbury Tales. Shakespeare mentions the eglantine rose in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Poets, including Dryden, Keats and John Greenleaf Whittier, planted the fragrant eglantine firmly in their verses.
The botanical name, Rosa eglanteria was bestowed on the plant by Linnaeus in the eighteenth century. The species name comes from the Latin word for “prickly.” Seeds or cuttings arrived in America with the earliest settlers, naturalizing themselves readily. According to horticultural historian Denise Wyles Adams, eglantines were observed in America as early as 1670, when an Englishman, John Josselyn, saw them growing in New England gardens. George Washington also wrote about the rose in 1786.
The rambunctious prickly nature of the eglantine may have diminished its popularity in the twentieth and now the twenty-first century. However, there are some eglantine hybrids available from antique rose specialists today; especially those bred in the 1890’s by an aristocratic Englishman, James Wilde, 1st Baron Penzance (1816-1899). Lord Penzance, in addition to being a keen gardener and rose breeder, was a lawyer by occupation and was known for his unassailable belief that Shakespeare’s works were actually written by Francis Bacon. When not defending this point of view, he crossed Rosa eglanteria with a Persian rose, Rosa foetida, to produce 16 new eglantine hybrids named after characters from Walter Scott novels. His other two eglantines were named, not surprisingly, ‘Lord Penzance’ and ‘Lady Penzance’.
My favorite of the eglantine hybrids is a German rose, ‘Goldbusch’. Introduced by the well-known breeder Kordes in 1954, it is buff-yellow, with large clusters of semi-double blossoms and the characteristic apple-scented foliage. My garden is not large enough for most of the eglantines, but I may make an exception just this once. My husband, who thinks 42 rose buses is enough, will roll his eyes. I will revel in the scent.
You can obtain custom-grown eglantines from Vintage Gardens, 4130 Gravenstein Road, Sebastopol, CA, 95472; (707) 829-2035; www.vintagegardens.com. Rogue Valley Roses of Ashland, OR also supplies eglantines. Contact them at (541) 535-1307 or at www.roguevalleyroses.com.