Prickly Rose

Size, growth and what to expect

It grows fast, nearly three feet a year in our growth estimator. It makes a bristly shrub usually 3 to 6 feet tall, sometimes 8, and spreads by underground stems into thickets. One clone can cover 100 to 200 square feet, and because it sprouts again after fire, a clone may live for hundreds of years.

Fragrant pink flowers about 1 to 2 inches across open singly or in twos in June and July. The hips turn orange-red to bright red in August and September, up to nearly an inch long, and they hang on through winter. They make jelly, syrup and tea, and grouse, songbirds, hares, rodents and bears eat them. Deer, elk and moose browse the stems.

It grows wild across the boreal North from Alaska to Quebec and northern New England, south in the Rockies to New Mexico and on the Plains to the Dakotas. Farther south it holds on in cold pockets, such as ice-cave slopes in Iowa and Wisconsin and Ice Mountain in West Virginia. Its home is forest edges, meadows, stream banks, rocky ridges and sandy shores.

How to grow Prickly Rose

Prickly rose grows in full sun or part shade, and it flowers and fruits best in the open. It takes most well-drained soils, sandy, loamy or gravelly, and seasonal flooding along streams, but not peat or ground that stays waterlogged. It spreads by underground stems into a thicket, so give it room. Keep each plant 5 feet from a wall. At its size it can go within 15 feet of overhead wires.

Saplings ship bare-root or potted. Plant them dormant, from leaf fall until bud swell, in a hole wider than the roots and no deeper. Set the crown at the soil line, put the native soil back in, and keep the mulch clear of the canes. Seed needs a warm spell and then a cold one. Sow it outdoors in summer a quarter inch deep, and seedlings come up the next spring. Sown in fall, most of it waits until the second spring. Indoors, keep it damp and warm for four months, then in the refrigerator for three.

Water weekly through the first summer. Deer, hares and rabbits browse wild roses, so guard young plants with wire. Wear heavy gloves, since the stems bristle with fine prickles. Cut out old canes and stray suckers at the ground while it is dormant, since it needs careful pruning to look its best.

Each flower carries both male and female parts, so there are no male and female plants to pair. Most wild roses first flower and set seed at 2 to 5 years old, with good crops every year or two. Bumble bees and honey bees work the flowers, and in Alaska beekeepers count it a major nectar source. It is prone to fungal leaf diseases. As in other wild roses, tiny chalcid wasps grow inside many of the seeds, often spoiling half of them or more.