Wild Rose #2 Traditional Cache

Wild Roses are so beautiful they deserve more than one cache. These roses are a lighter pink than the ones at the previous cache. This is a Park and Grab.

   The True "Wild" Roses

The botanical term for wild rose is "species rose", which means just what it says — a species that occurs naturally, with no help from man — a true "wildflower." There are over 100 of these worldwide, some native to North America, many from the Orient and Europe. These true wild roses are all single with exactly five petals — never more, and almost all of them are pink, with a few whites and reds, and even fewer that range toward yellow. (By the way, there are now over 20,000 hybrids, with about 200 new ones every year.)

North American Native Roses

Two of the most widespread species roses you may see are Rosa carolina, or the Carolina Rose, common in thickets, and Rosa palustris, commonly called "Swamp Rose", since it grows in wet ground. Both are rather small, scrambling shrubs with spectacular, 2" wide-open single blooms with five bright pink petals. And both are native to a huge area from the entire Atlantic seaboard all the way west to Nebraska.

Most all North American native roses look a lot like the photo above, pink with exactly five petals. Most of the native rose plants are smallish shrubs, with canes no longer than three or four feet.

The Most Misused Common Names of All

If your Aunt Sarah, who knew her plants, told you that wild rose at the farm was a "Pasture Rose", that's fine, but don't expect anyone else to know what that means. Pasture Rose, Prairie Rose, Wild Rose, Dog Rose, Eglantine, Sweetbriar, and Scotch Briar are just a few of the very common names for wild roses that mean different things in different places. (Probably ten different species are called "Pasture Rose" in various parts of the country.)

The Romance of the Wild Rose

Of course, roses are probably the No. 1 symbol of love in human history. We've even had a War of the Roses, not to mention centuries of rose perfumes, oils, medicines, and foods. Today in the US, the "wild rose" competes with the violet as our most popular state flower; both are the symbols of several states. And even though the fantastic new roses offer you almost anything you may desire in color or fragrance, many people think there is no purer beauty than the true wild rose.

After all, Emily Bronte wrote, "Love is like the wild rose." And Robert Burns did not write his most famous love poem about some gaudy, man-made, orange and pink creation, but stated clearly and simply, "My love is like a red, red rose." (Read the famous Robert Burns poem below). But it was surely Gertrude Stein who summed it up best, with her her classic line about the rose's incomparable beauty: A rose is a rose is a rose." She did not write "A rose is a rose is a bi-colored hybrid."                     

The cache is a camoed "micro", with a rolled log held tight with a rubber band. It's in a tiny plastic zip lock bag. Please keep track of it all, so you can put it back the way you found it. BYOP and no tweezers, please, they kill the plastic. It's tied in.