…”Playing with colour and form in the garden is the nearest that most of us will ever get to painting…”

Mary Keen, 1991

Rosa Eglanteria (featured rose)

This species is the only British wild Rose which has always been permitted to rank as a garden plant; its compact habit and delicious fragrance have from very early days assured it a welcome place in English gardens.

It is a vigorous and hardy Rose, and there are some well known instances of its remarkable longevity. Some of them, of course, must be taken with reservation, but even so there is ample proof that the Sweet Briar under favourable conditions will live to a very considerable age. A large bush growing in a Touraine garden was cut down some sixty years since and upon the rings being counted they were found to number something like a hundred and twenty; the plant had shown no signs whatever of deterioration, and the thick gnarled stems were perfectly sound. In the garden of an old castle in Saxony there was a bush growing in a shady moist corner and reaching the height of some twenty feet, and it was still well furnished with leaves and blossomed and bore fruit in profusion. This plant was locally believed to have been growing there when Charlemagne’s third son Louis was crowned Emperor of the West at Aix-le-Chapelle in A.D. 814!

Sweet Briar fruit tastes mealy and insipid, whereas the fruit of its near relative Rosa micrantha is slightly acid and pleasant to the taste. Although the fragrance from the Eglantine is so exquisite either after a shower of rain or when the leaves are touched, the water distilled from them yields a perfume far from agreeable unless mixed with some other ingredient.


Listen to music from the era of this rose



J. SAVALL · Hespérion XX · "Lachrimae Antiquae" · Dowland ·