Wild Rose: Simple Things to Do With the Plants Around You. (Little Wild Library) - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Clare Gogerty lives on a smallholding in deepest Herefordshire which she is opening as a spiritual retreat in 2023. The sound of shamanic drumming often comes from her orchard, and herbal remedies are frequently cooked up in the kitchen. She has been interested in magic, druidry and folklore since a child, encouraged by her father, an enthusiastic dowser and leyline hunter. A former magazine editor, she is now a freelance journalist and author, writing about spirituality, travel, homes and gardens.

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Coming across a hedgerow covered with wild roses is like stumbling upon the essence of summer. The simple, papery, pink and white blooms sprinkled along thorny briars turn their open faces to the sun and fill the air with a sweet, delicate fragrance. It is a sight that puts a skip in your step and a broad smile on your face.

Fortunately, various species of wild rose are common throughout the UK, Europe, North America, and Asia. They grow happily where other plants would struggle – car parks, wasteland, and over your hedge into the neighbour’s garden – so they are easy to find. The only obstacle to their survival is over-enthusiastic mechanical hedge-cutting – left alone they romp away and flower from early to midsummer.

To the forager, wild roses present more than a visual feast; the petals have many delightful and fragrant uses from jam to confetti to cake decoration and Turkish delight. And when the rosehips form in late summer, the forager returns to the hedgerow to harvest the fruit by turning it into delicious syrup and oil. Birds including blackbirds, redwings, and fieldfares also head to the hedgerow to tuck into the vitamin-packed hips, accompanied by small mammals such as bank voles and squirrels.

Roses are the most recognisable and loved of all flowers, often voted as a favourite bloom. The Tudor Rose, a combination of the red rose of Lancaster and the white rose of York, which resembles two wild roses placed one on top of the other, is the heraldic emblem of England, and its national flower. War poet Rupert Brooke declared it England’s unofficial rose in his poem ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’. The poem was written when he was homesick in Berlin in 1912.