apple rose

Photo: Roger Culos — CC BY-SA 4.0 · source

Survives zone 4 through 8

Harvest calendar

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

Apple rose bears some of the largest, fleshiest, most vitamin-C-rich hips of any wild rose — genuinely excellent for jam, jelly, and tea, on a par with rugosa in fruit quality — and its apple-scented foliage is a real, identifying trait rather than a marketing claim. ⚠ 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 4–8

Habit

Shrub

Edible part

Fruit

Ripens

Summer–autumn

Mature size

Upright shrub 1–2 m with greyish downy foliage

Light

Full sun

Soil pH

6.0–7.0 (near-neutral)

Environment

Montane

Native range

Europe — from Scandinavia south to Spain, and east to the Caucasus and western Asia including Iran.

Status

Both wild and cultivated

Years to fruit

2–4 yrs

Growth speed

Medium.

Spacing

120 cm (47 in) apart — about 1.4 m² (16 sq ft) per plant

Leaf shape

Pinnately compound leaves with 5, 7, or 9 oval-to-oblong leaflets, bluish-green above, hairy on both surfaces and densely resin-glanded beneath — the source of the apple-like fragrance. Stems bear scattered, slender, straight-to-slightly-curved prickles, notably less dense than rugosa's armament.

Root system

Multistemmed with some root suckering, but less aggressively colonizing than rugosa or acicularis; not documented as invasive.

Fruit description

Bears some of the largest hips among wild roses — up to about 30mm in diameter, red to orange, with a notably thick, pleasantly acid pulp rather than the thin flesh typical of most wild roses. Vitamin C content is exceptionally high, documented at roughly 1303mg per 100g fresh weight. Good raw or cooked, and genuinely well suited to jam, jelly, and rosehip tea — fruit quality comparable to, or exceeding, rugosa.

Propagation

Rose seed typically needs a two-year natural dormancy period to germinate. This can be shortened by scarifying seed and warm-stratifying it 2–3 weeks in damp peat at 27–32°C, then cold-stratifying 4 months at 3°C; alternatively stored seed can be cold-stratified 6 weeks at 5°C and sown early, or green seed sown fresh. Also propagated by half-ripe cuttings in July, hardwood cuttings 20–25cm long in early autumn, layering, and division of root suckers.

Pollination

Pollinated by bees, flies, and Lepidoptera (moths and butterflies); no further hip-set requirements beyond general self-fertility are documented.

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.