The How and Why Library/Flowers/Section IV
IV. The Bonny Briar Bush
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It was a little bird that told how the wild rose came to be growing in the wild garden.
There wasn't another wild rose anywhere in the neighborhood. Roses are something like human babies. They do not like the smoky air of cities. You can coax garden roses to bloom in front door yards and parks, but wild roses stay outside, where the air is pure and sweet.
When winter came, and the gray weed-stalks rustled their dry seed-cases in the wind, the rose seemed the only live thing in the waste place. Its thorny, leafless canes were a bright red-brown. Its scarlet seed-hips glowed like little coals of fire above the first November snow. The rose-hips were as big and heavy and red as the little apples of the hawthorn tree. And they were so firmly fastened to the woody stems that the wind could not loosen them. Some foolish robins, who had stayed in the north too long, made a breakfast of the rose-hips and started south for the winter.
Birds have perfect little mills of stomachs for grinding worms and seeds, but rose-hips are so thick and hard that it must take the birds days to digest them. The seeds inside are like little stones wrapped in spiny hairs, so they pass right through the birds unharmed, and are planted far away. In this way the wild rose has been scattered by birds over many parts of the northern world, from very cold countries almost to the hot tropics, and far up mountain sides. Some bird had dropped rose seed in that jungle of sturdy weeds in the city. It took root and grew there, because it happened to fall on a bit of soft, rich ground near a rotting stump of scrub oak. But it never grew very large or bore many blossoms.
The rose has a woody stem that grows, year after year, in rings, like a tree. Some people call it a rose-tree. But it is only a shrub or bush, the promise of a tree. The wild rose is often only a clump of separate, thorny canes. On them you can find the tiny leaf and flower buds in winter. And in the spring you can peel the thin, satiny bark away, and find the green layer of the new growth under it.
In March, when the buds begin to swell, put some branches of the wild rose in water, in a sunny window, and watch the leaves unfold. They are compound leaves of five, seven or even nine oval,saw-notched leaflets. Where a rose leaf joins a stem, two ears or wings are set, giving it a broader, firmer hold. The under side of the leaf is furry, or even a little prickly along the mid-rib, and there are sharp thorns on trunk and branches.
Thorns are curious things. They start to be leaves or branches but get nipped, in some way, so they turn into thorns. They are very useful to roses. They help the slender canes catch on supports, and they frighten away some enemies. Little boys and girls would be sure to pull too many sweet roses if it wasn't for the scratchy thorns. Can you think of any other plants that have thorns? Thistles? No thistles have spines and prickles. A true thorn has wood and bark. Blackberry and raspberry briars have thorns. So have crabapple and hawthorn trees. Those plants, too, have five-petaled, rose-like, fragrant blossoms. Perhaps—but wait a minute. Don't think too fast!
The blossoms of the rose grow in clusters at the ends of the branches. You find there a bunch of hard green buds that seem to be the swollen ends of stems. The bud is solid where it joins the stem, but the covering of the tip is parted into five, thick, green, leaf-like scales that are folded around a hard center. Those scales are called sepals. As the bud swells, pink lines peep out between the sepals. Then, slowly, the sepals separate into five pointed lips of the solid, round flower cup below. They flare back and show five, broad, pink silk petals set in a fluttering rosette.
Just five in the wild rose! Once in a long, long time you may find ten petals, for you know there are some plants born with a genius for going up higher. The rose is so beautiful, and it has such a sweet smell, that it has been petted and fed and helped to grow better, in sheltered gardens, for hundreds of years. In every country it was just a little different, even when wild. It was a tiny shrub a few inches high, in far northern places, a tall bush or a long, trailing vine farther south. And it has been transplanted and the pollen crossed, so many times, that it has been wonderfully changed. From the single pink, or white, or yellow blossom, the rose has grown into the many-petaled, many-tinted queen of the garden.
It was easier to improve the blossom of the wild rose because, just inside the circle of five petals is a little forest of pollen-tipped threads, around the five button-topped columns in the middle. The rose makes more pollen than is needed to grow seeds. It has no honey to give to bees and butterflies. It has its pretty color, itssweet perfume and its pollen to attract friendly visitors. These pollen threads are very ready to drop their yellow dust and broaden into petals. And they are just as ready to turn back again. If the seeds of the finest, double garden roses are planted, they sometimes forget all their long training, and go back to the single-petaled blossom and straggling canes of the wild rose. They have to be grown from cuttings to keep them tamed.
Left alone, nature might never have made one of our double roses of the garden. She doesn't seem to care to make the flower better. All she thinks about is the seed. As the rose must depend upon birds to scatter her seeds, she tries to see how tempting she can make the fruit, so the birds will be sure to eat it. When the pink petals fall, the seed cup swells and closes its mouth, leaving those five sepal scales to turn dry and brown at the top of the red hip. The rose hip is too hard for some seed-eating birds to manage in their little insides, so one member of the rose family made the soft, sweet, seed-filled fruit of the blackberry. Another one made the raspberry.
Yes, those plants are cousins of the rose. They have the same bright-barked, thorny, woody stems; the same spiny, compound leaves, and the many five-petaled rosette flowers, with forests of pollen-tipped hairs in them. In the briar berries the blossoms are white and the pollen dark. Down in the grass nature set the same white, rose-blossom on a creeping vine, and scattered the hard seeds on the outside of a sweet fruit, like stitches of yellow silk on a red satin cone—the strawberry!
Of course, no one knows which of all the rose family came first. Very likely it was the little yellow-flowered cinquefoil that looks so much like a wild strawberry. Beside making seeds it also grows by runners, that strike root at the joints. So does the strawberry. If raspberry and blackberry canes are bent over to the ground, they will often strike root, and start new plants. And branches of roses, and many of their cousins, can be grafted on other root stocks. So can the branches of orchard fruit trees be grafted.
How much the apple blossom looks like the wild rose. It has five pink petals set in a rosette. It has a little forest of pollen hairs, too. When the petals fall the seed case swells and closes at the top and leaves, at the flower end, five little dry, brown sepals. The leaves of the apple tree are furry on the under side, the bark of the tree is smooth and bright, and the wild apples—the hawthorns andcrabapples have thorns. The apple tree is a very near cousin of the rose, nearer, very likely, than the strawberry. There are many varieties of wild apples in different countries—the Siberian crab-apple is a useful fruit in its wild state. Like the rose, the wild apple has been trained, fed, sheltered, transplanted, cross-pollinated and grafted, until there are now dozens of varieties of big juicy apples in our orchards. The pear and the quince are near cousins of the rose, too.
The wild plums and cherries are not so near. They have a single nut-like seed in a stony case. They grew, perhaps, in a roundabout way, from the almond, and so did the peach and the apricot. A peach stone is pitted like the paper shell of the almond, and the peach seed is often mistaken for the nut of the bitter almond.
It is the rose that gave the name to the family. Rosaceae is the name. Isn't it pretty? It ought to be, for every member of the family makes the earth fragrant and cheerful with their bouquets of blossoms. The rose is so sweet, so innocent and beautiful that we borrow its name for little girls, as we do of the blossoms of the violet and the lily. In Japan, where they grow orchard trees for the flowers, they often call little girls plum blossom and cherry blossom.
Every member of the rose family is like the bonny briar bush in disliking the smoky air of cities. They grow best in the open country, under the wide, blue, sunny sky, in clean earth free from weeds, where birds build their nests and there is a pleasant hum of bees. And here is a secret very few people know. You can find the wild rose blossom in winter. Find a beautiful rosy apple. Cut it across the middle. Then cut a thin slice from one half and hold it up to the light. You will find the five rose petals there, very plainly marked, in the heart of the apple. (See Rose, Strawberry, Raspberry, Blackberry, Apple, Pear, Quince, Almond, Plum, Cherry, Peach, Grafting. Plate, Volume II, page 686. Pollination).