arctic rose

Photo: Walter Siegmund (talk) — CC BY-SA 3.0 · source

Survives zone 2 through 6

Harvest calendar

Best planted in early spring after your last frost, or in fall before the ground freezes, depending on your climate.

Arctic rose is the most cold-hardy of the six species here, native well into the boreal and Arctic zone. Its hips are modest in size and thin-fleshed compared with rugosa or villosa, but they were a genuine traditional food source for northern peoples, eaten fresh after frost or dried for tea and winter stores. ⚠ Deseed the hips before eating: the ring of stiff hairs around the seeds is a gut and skin irritant, and is what old-fashioned itching powder was made from. Strain it out of any purée or syrup.

Hardiness

Zone 2–6

Habit

Shrub

Edible part

Fruit

Ripens

Summer–autumn

Mature size

Prickly shrub 1–2 m, suckering into thickets

Light

Full sun to partial (most shade-flexible rose)

Soil pH

6.0–7.0 (near-neutral)

Environment

Arctic and boreal

Native range

Circumpolar in the boreal forest region — from Alaska and across Canada to Quebec and New England, south through the Rocky Mountains to northern New Mexico and across the northern Great Plains in North America, and across Siberia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, China, Korea, Japan, and northern Europe (Finland, Sweden, European Russia) in Eurasia.

Status

Wild

Years to fruit

2–4 yrs

Growth speed

Medium once established, spreading steadily by rhizome after that.

Spacing

150 cm (59 in) apart — about 2.3 m² (24 sq ft) per plant

Leaf shape

Pinnately compound leaves 7–14cm long with 3–7 ovate, serrate leaflets. Larger stems are usually densely covered with straight prickles and bristles, giving rise to the common name 'prickly rose'.

Root system

Suckering and rhizomatous — spreads by shallow horizontal rhizomes that send up new stems, forming clonal thickets rather than growing as a single non-suckering shrub.

Fruit description

Hips are red to orange, pear-shaped to ovoid, 10–15mm in diameter, with only a thin layer of flesh around the many seeds — smaller and less fleshy than the large culinary hips of rugosa or villosa. Flavor is rich and sweet, best after the fruit has been frosted. Vitamin C content runs about 2–3% dry weight, up to 7% in some populations. Hips persist on the plant through winter and were a traditional boreal foraging food for indigenous peoples across its circumpolar range.

Propagation

Rose seed is notoriously slow and erratic — the hard-coated seed can take up to two years to germinate in nature. Growers speed this by scarifying the seed and warm-stratifying it 2–3 weeks in damp peat at 27–32°C, then cold-stratifying 4 months at 3°C; a simpler cold-stratification of 6 weeks at 5°C is also used but germination may still take up to 18 months. Also propagated by half-ripe cuttings with a heel in July, by hardwood cuttings 20–25cm long in early autumn, by layering (about 12 months to root), and readily by dividing the rhizome-connected root suckers during dormancy.

Pollination

Self-fertile

The edible parts listed above are a starting point, not a field guide. Identify a plant with certainty — ideally against a local authority — before eating any part of it, and read the full disclaimer. Spotted something wrong? Report it.