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Walk Through The Garden, 2008A
Walk Through The Garden, 2008previous rose ------- next rose
Rosa
arkansanaNorth American Native Species
When I moved to the Ranch, there was a patch of R. arkansana growing in the part of a field which now houses the garden. It bloomed once that first year. Then we widened the horse pasture and every succeeding year the horses ate any roses that grew up. When the pottery was built, I got that part of the pasture back to use as the rose bed. But I was sure the arkansanas were goners; they were parked on, graded over, flooded, used as loading areas, and generally, I thought, destroyed.
Nope. That summer, they bloomed with gusto, and spread to take over an area about two by four meters. I dug up a sucker to put in the garden, where it seems to be doing just fine.
You find R. arkansana all over this part of Boulder County. It's anywhere there might be water—on roadsides, under bridges, in irrigation ditches, and in the lower parts of fields. In fact, the part of the yard my arkansanas grow in is often flooded in the spring, and completely wet at other times, conditions that are not to most roses' taste.
Rosa arkansana (often called the "Prairie Rose," although there are other local roses also called that), is a small bush that prefers to live in tall grass. It seems never to get much taller than the grass which surrounds it, except in the garden. The flowers, borne in small clusters, come late in the season. They open a pale, true rose pink with darker reverses and a variable amount of stiping or stippling on the midlines of the petals. Over the two or three days that each flower blooms, the ground color lightens and the stripes, if there are any, darken. Hips turn red very quickly. The (up to) eleven leaflet leaves look like sets of hanging, aquamarine stairs.
Last year I collected numerous hips and now have them out in flats. Arkansana is a rarity among wild roses in that it will often flower the first year. Now if I can only get the hips to sprout... I have dreams of growing a super-spotted version of this unique spotted rose.
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