ROSEHIP HOORAY!
They look divine and provide food for humans and birds alike – Monty Don gives three cheers for rosehips
EVERYBODY loves roses — and if you don’t, it simply means you haven’t yet found the right rose to love. Roses can climb or ramble, consist of delicate single flowers or a mass of crumpled petals, be small and almost fragile or stonking great bushes almost like small trees.
There are pure-white roses, as well as every shade of yellow, pink, orange and red going through to the deepest, richest burgundy. Alas, the rose season is coming to an end, though it’s by no means over — my hybrid perpetuals are just hitting their second stride with an autumnal display almost as good as the first flush of flowers in June and July.
But the real seasonal display of my roses (and I have accumulated well over 100 different varieties and species over the years) are the fabulous fruits that many roses create from their earlier flowers, namely their hips. Rosehips come in many shapes, sizes and colours and in some roses are every bit as good as the flowers they’ve developed from. I have two enormous bushes of Rosa moyesii ‘Geranium’ that I planted more than 20 years ago and which are both over 15ft tall and almost as wide. For about ten days in June they are speckled with single, bright-red flowers, spaced like ruby stars in the sky.
ALTHOUGH absolutely lovely, this is really only the warm-up act for what is to follow — because ‘Geranium’ has the most wonderful hips, bright orange, bottle or gourd-shaped, and hanging from the branches like Christmas decorations. These last much longer than the flowers, until the birds finally eat them all.
There is one slight hitch with R. moyesii ‘Geranium’, which is that it is a little fickle, rarely putting in the same performance year on year — and this year happens to be one of its least impressive shows. But last year was great and so, perhaps, will be the next.
Not all roses produce hips. For this to happen the flowers must be pollinated, so you need to encourage bees and other pollinating insects into your garden. But some cultivars are infertile and others have a flower structure that makes pollination all but impossible.
Certainly all species roses, which have small and always single flowers, produce hips of some kind. The range is huge, from the great tomato-like berries on the rugosas, to gobstoppers on ‘Scharlachglut’, oval aniseed balls on the dog roses, black ones on R. pimpinellifolia, orange hips set against scarlet foliage on R. nitida and small dangles of orange on R. cantabrigiensis and R. willmottiae.
The dog rose, R. canina, is reputed to have the best tasting of all rosehips, which are used for rosehip syrup and jelly and a fruity tea. They were collected in the Second World War as a source of vitamin C (weight for weight they contain up to 20 times more than oranges), and as a child I used the hairs that line the inside of the hips as itching powder!
But if you do not collect the hips, birds certainly will — they’re an important source of winter food for the likes of blackbirds, fieldfares and redwings. Of course, to obtain rosehips of any kind you will have to leave the fading flowers and not deadhead them. This can look messy for a week or two but it’s a price worth paying.