Posts Tagged ‘wild rose’
roses by the road
A few years ago, we trimmed out the bushes all along our cabin road, to prevent our truck from getting scratched. During the trimming, my husband saved a small prickly rose bush near to the road edge. Each spring we watch for the pale pink of its blooms. Each fall, we count the red rose hips as we drive by. This year, the bush has grown as tall as me! Today, it was covered with pale pink roses and smelled so sweet!
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This is the swamp rose (Rosa palustris), a common wild rose in New Brunswick. You can recognize it by its pale pink flowers, its hooked spines, and its narrow stipules (winged sheaths at the bases of leaf stalks). In fall, it will have small round red rosehips.
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All my best,
Jane
roses of summer
When I go for a walk this time of year, I visit our rosebush and I think of how rosebushes have been a part of my life:
- the little bush beside our road at the lake, delicate pink double roses and small rosehips… my husband loves this little bush and is always very careful not to cut it when he trims the lane…
- the huge rosehips on the rose bush (Rosa rugosa Thunb.) at Castalia Beach on Grand Manan Island, rigor in the harshest conditions; once I tried to bring a slip of the bush home in a banana peel (to keep the moisture) but, although it lived and grew, it only survived a few seasons…
- a tunnel of rosebushes and huge rosehips next to a parking lot where we stopped in Matane, Quebec on our trip to Gaspé a decade ago…
- a pair of long-gone rosebushes at my Mom’s old home place – when she and my Aunt were little girls, they called the rosebushes Mrs. Pears and Mrs. Rhodes and would visit them with their doll carriages to collect the red rosehips.
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fragments from a walk
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brambles and bedstraw
insect frass and dew
the petals of a wild rose
a rosehip
a red gall
swollen as a nose with crying
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Nuphar and Nymphaea
lily leaves a plate
offering yellow to the sun
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familiar trees
suddenly grown tall
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© Jane Tims 2008
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