How Does a Rose Bush Grow?

Where the Wild Rose Grows

When President Reagan designated the rose as the American national flower in 1986, he picked a winner. Roses grow all over the U.S. Indeed, roses grow everywhere in the temperate areas of the Northern hemisphere. Today's cultivated roses are descendants of "old" roses---Rosa gallica, cabbage rose (R. centifolia) and Chinese (R indicia).

With each combination and hybridization, roses have developed new growth habits and bloomed with new form and color. They are one of the most adaptive plants in the gardening world: the hundreds of species of the order Rosecae have given rise to hundreds more garden varieties, from stately tea roses to sturdy rugosas. Most grow as erect shrubs with hairy branches, or "canes," rising from a central stem. Leaves are alternate, oval and sharp-toothed; they are smooth to leathery in appearance. Common Rosa flowers are five-petaled blooms of red, pink or white that bloom in low, rambling shrubs.

Their flowers are edible, and oil is used for rose water and perfume. The fruit of the rose, or "rose hip," has been used for centuries for sweets like jelly, marmalade and syrup. The pods are used to make a tea rich in Vitamin C, for which the medieval rose earned the title of the Apothecary's Rose (a variety still grown today). Rose hip oil is also used in beauty products.

Improving on a Classic

Widespread rose culture began with the ancient Romans. They brought one of the oldest garden roses, R. alba, to Britain where one of its descendants became the emblem of the House of York. Gardeners have developed hundreds of hybrids that have capitalized on form or color variations by cross-pollinating or taking stem cuttings of several plants. Most hybrid garden roses are grown by "grafting"---taking stem cuttings from a rose and splicing it onto a common rose root to improve hardiness. Gardeners have bred roses to flower in blooms with five petals to large balls of hundreds of petals but all grow from the same hipped base in multiples of five. Hybridizers have altered the height, shape and bloom season of roses but the basic form of the bush remains that of a shrub with hairy, thorny branches that support one or more seasons of bloom. This is followed by fruit and a season of dormancy.

There Will Always Be Roses

Rose hips contain seeds for new plants. The fragrant, tasty flowers and fruits are attractive to roving herbivores (like deer) and fruit-eating birds (like thrushes and finches) which cross-pollinate flowers and spread the seeds in their droppings. Many wild roses have tiny, thistle-like "prickles" to "grab" surfaces for stability that developed through adaptation into protective thorns. It allows propagation by runners. The roses' natural defenses have guaranteed that only hardy beasts will consume their fruit and carry their seeds far and wide, guaranteeing a wide distribution of the species. Seeds of every variety tend to grow closer to the parent than the hybrid "cousin" in form, ensuring their presence in fields and alongside roadways from Guadalajara to Greenland and China to Chicago.

Resources

• American Rose Society
• Rose history and culture
• The botany of roses