To find the sweetbrier (Rosa eglanteria), the favorite rose of Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare — and a galaxy of other English poets in the rugged granite country of our southeastern Ozarks was an experience quite as delightful as it was surprising.
Find it we did with all its fragrance and red berries — apparently as happy as if it were growing in a hedge bordering some peaceful English land where a Keats or a Herrick might chance upon it and be inspired.
Although sweetbrier, or eglantine, is native to Europe, it has become widely naturalized in this country.
However, it is not plentiful here in the midwest, either in gardens or in the wild. My brief acquaintance with this wild rose leads me to wonder why it is not used more in American gardens.
Eglantine has several distinct advantages. Among them are its pleasing fragrance throughout the growing season, the pretty blossoms in May or June, and the brilliant red berries in the fall.
While the leaves distill a pleasantly sweet fragrance throughout the growing season, I have found it more pronounced in spring than in the fall.
Single Blossoms Are Smaller
A summer shower tends to accentuate it. The single blossoms are smaller than our native wild roses, and the color is more profound.
The foliage is dense and quite distinct from our native roses, and the sweetbriar’s branched stems give it a shrubby, compact growth. After October’s frosts have stripped it of leaves and fragrance, the bright red berries put on a show that lasts well through the winter.
Since birds do not relish them, they adorn the bush for an extended period, and Birds will eat them when other food is scarce. That may well account for the isolated plant I found at Graniteville.
Eglantine is the common name used more frequently, perhaps than sweetbrier. The rose is well named because the slender, curved thorns are fanglike and vicious, but poets are prone to dwell more on its fragrance than on the prickles.
Leigh Hunt knew all the names, as evidenced by the following from The Song of the Sweet-Briar:
Wild-Rose, Sweet-briar, Eglantine,
All these pretty names are mine,
And scent in every leaf is mine,
And a leaf for all is mine,
And the scent — oh, that’s divine!
Happy-sweet and pungent-fine,
Pure as dew, and picked as wine.
Parkinson’s description of it applies pretty well to our single plant growing wild in the Ozarks:
“The Sweet Briar, or Eglantine, is not only planted in gardens for the sweetness of its leaves, but growing wild roses in many kinds of wood and hedges, hath exceeding long green shoots armed with the cruelest sharp and strong thorns and thicker set than is in any Rose, either wild or tame.
Related: Know the 5 Popular Rose Types
The leaves are smaller than in most of those nourished up in Gardens, seven or nine, very green and sweeter in smell than the leaves of any other kind of Rose. The flowers are small, single, blush Roses.”
44659 by R. R. Thomasson