Wow! eBook
The Little Wild Library: Wild Rose: Simple things to do with the plants around you.
Author(s): Clare Gogerty (Author)
- Publisher: David & Charles
- Publication Date: September 16, 2025
- Language: English
- Print length: 112 pages
- ISBN-10: 1446313751
- ISBN-13: 9781446313756
Book Description
Peeking out of hedgerows and spilling a beautiful scent, the wild rose is one of the most charming wild plants to find. A favourite of bees when the flowers are in bloom, its vibrant red rosehips are a much needed burst of colour as fall turns to winter and the landscape darkens.
In The Little Wild Library: Wild Rose, discover how to make the most of this beautiful plant, with recipes and makes to try throughout the year. Once you’ve found your favourite wild rose, come back as the seasons change and find new things to do with your foraged treasure – from edible treats to useful tinctures. Discover recipes that make use of robust and plump rosehips that decorate the branches in autumn, and return in the spring to forage and gather petals and flowers to explore new ways to use this most ancient of roses. All the recipes and makes are beginner friendly, making it easier and more fulfilling to engage with the natural world and form a connection to the plants and flowers that decorate our lives.
Learn how to identify the wild rose amidst its hedgerow friends from the comprehensive botanical information included, and take this pocket-sized book out on foraging adventures to help spot the rosa canina waving merrily on a spring breeze, or brightening a dull fall afternoon. Through the book, learn about the history of the wild rose, including how it got its name, and discover some of the myths, legends, and folklore attached to this beautiful plant.
The perfect beginner’s guide to foraging, in a handy pocket-sized format, The Little Wild LIbrary: Wild Rose will reveal the secrets of the hedgerow and inspire those new to foraging to experiment and explore the beautiful plants around them.
Editorial Reviews
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Coming across a hedgerow covered with wild roses is like stumbling upon the essence of summer. The simple, papery, pink and white blooms sprinkled along thorny briars turn their open faces to the sun and fill the air with a sweet, delicate fragrance. It is a sight that puts a skip in your step and a broad smile on your face.
Fortunately, various species of wild rose are common throughout the UK, Europe, North America, and Asia. They grow happily where other plants would struggle – car parks, wasteland, and over your hedge into the neighbour’s garden – so they are easy to find. The only obstacle to their survival is over-enthusiastic mechanical hedge-cutting – left alone they romp away and flower from early to midsummer.
To the forager, wild roses present more than a visual feast; the petals have many delightful and fragrant uses from jam to confetti to cake decoration and Turkish delight. And when the rosehips form in late summer, the forager returns to the hedgerow to harvest the fruit by turning it into delicious syrup and oil. Birds including blackbirds, redwings, and fieldfares also head to the hedgerow to tuck into the vitamin-packed hips, accompanied by small mammals such as bank voles and squirrels.
Roses are the most recognisable and loved of all flowers, often voted as a favourite bloom. The Tudor Rose, a combination of the red rose of Lancaster and the white rose of York, which resembles two wild roses placed one on top of the other, is the heraldic emblem of England, and its national flower. War poet Rupert Brooke declared it England’s unofficial rose in his poem ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’. The poem was written when he was homesick in Berlin in 1912.
