A thorn-less wild rose
A rose without thorns need not be an oxymoron.
The reddish stems of the Smooth Rose, Rosa blanda, are completely thorn-less, and in fact this the how you to tell it apart from the half dozen or so roses that grow wild in New England.
Rosa blanda: lovely in summer, fall and winter
The native Smooth Rose occurs intermittently along the roadsides of new England. But when grown en-masse it makes a great multi-season hedgerow that will flourish in full sun or part shade.
Click through this slide show to see how it looks in June, October and December in our garden, where it creates a nice dense separation between the long flowerbed and the road behind:
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Rosa blanda starts out with a big show of single pink flowers in the second half of June, attracting the bees and creating a beautiful backdrop for the peonies and garden roses.
But it’s lovely in other seasons too! In the fall I will add its red rose hips to the bouquets of asters I bring indoors….no prickles to contend with!! And, as you can see from the Christmas day picture, even in winter the stems and the hips are red against the snow.
Small treats for a big moose
Proof of the thorn-less nature of our rose hedge came some years back now. One morning in early June we were quite surprised to look out of the kitchen window to see a huge bull moose, EVER SO GENTLY stripping each rose stem and eating the leaves and buds. He stayed over an hour, only moving on when he had stripped every stem bare…There were no rose flowers or hips that year!!
Nurturing nature
When Dick and I started making our Vermont garden back in 1994 he spied a few small rose shrubs volunteering in the rough hedgerow behind the garden. Over the years he gently encouraged them by cutting out any obvious woody competition.
Now, 16 years later, we are blessed with a handsome hedge of native wild roses, about 10 feet deep and fifty feet long. They meander among the birch trees that separate the garden from the road and grow out into the sunny space beyond as well.
However Rosa blanda is definitely not a rose for the flower bed. Its ability to deal with rough grass tells us that in a few years it would also overwhelm garden perennials if given room in your flower bed. We maintain a ten foot wide ‘lawn path’ between the bed and the hedgerow to keep our rose hedge firmly in its designated place.