In spring and summer, the lanes and field margins of South Kintyre are awash with flowers: primroses and bluebells, cow parsley and campion. Each is lovely, and each has its season: midsummer being the time for nodding ox eye daisies and fragrant roses.
Because I’m thinking a lot about roses at the moment, I’ve noticed just how many are blooming in the landscape all around me.
This is Rosa Rugosa. It is not the wild rose of northern Europe, but is originally native to east Asia. In Japanese it is 浜安 (Hamanasu). Rosa Rugosa is the prefectural flower of Hokkaido prefecture, and there’s a nostalgic song about it blooming by the sea.
Rosa Rugosa blooms by the sea in South Kintyre as well.
This hardy rose thrives here, where high banks of prickly shrubs have been planted as boundary markers between neighbouring farms, separating barley fields and groups of grazing cattle.
Rosa Rugosa blooms among happily among the old hawthorn, and has displaced it along many field margins. This shrub is hardy and vigorous and does not mind the sandy soil or harsh salt winds that blow in from the sea. Over time, the local cattle have helped to disperse its seed, and the roses have spread out from the farms and fields into the dunes. . .
. . .and across the shoreline.
Introduced to combat coastal erosion in many parts of northern Europe and north America, Rosa Rugosa has run wild and taken over. In New England, it is considered an invasive species, and in Denmark and Finland it is illegal to sell or plant it. It’s a beautiful, resilient, thug of a shrub.
Walking beside a bank of Rosa Rugosa on a hot summer’s day is a truly heady experience. The flowers are heavily scented, and their delicious fragrance fills the air.
All of these qualities of the sea rose – its hardiness, its vigour, its gorgeous scent – are celebrated by the American poet, H.D, who saw Rosa Rugosa blooming by the dunes and beaches of New Jersey and New England.
This poem is taken from H.D’s Sea Garden (1916): a collection produced during her imagist phase. This style of poetry combines simple language with vivid imagery and (appropriately considering this flower’s origins) owes an awful lot to the poetry of Japan.
Sea Rose
Rose, harsh rose,
marred and with stint of petals,
meagre flower, thin,
sparse of leaf,
more precious
than a wet rose
single on a stem—
you are caught in the drift.
Stunted, with small leaf,
you are flung on the sand,
you are lifted
in the crisp sand
that drives in the wind.
Can the spice-rose
drip such acrid fragrance
hardened in a leaf?
(Photographs of rosa rugosa taken by Tom around Southend and Kiel)
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