I get a lot of request for videos about our native rose species and finally got one done.

While the familiar garden rose is one of the most popular plants with flower gardeners in North America, they offer little to our native pollinators and wildlife. The native roses are far superior to the non-native hybrid garden roses when it comes to supplying food to birds, small mammals, native bees, other pollinators and especially caterpillars and a species of pollen specialist bee. Not only do the native roses provide food for critters and insects, but they are also excellent cover shrubs and are important in providing nesting locations for several species of native bees. On top of all those great attributes, the highly nutritious rose hips are also edible to humans!

Hope you enjoy it!

Thanks for watching, Anthony

Very nice, Anthony, Love the wild roses. They are all over in this area. Not sure what type. But they smell great and the hips are packed with vitamin C.

Thanks Sharon! Several species of native roses in most of the US. They vary depending on where you are at.

Thanks , Anthony, I’m just glad they all smell so sweet and are pretty….

I have made a lot of flint tipped arrows with swamp rose. They grow with nice straight stems, and around here they tend to grow as single, more or less straight stalks, not shrub forms like most native roses. I can think of at least half dozen deer I killed with them. I even still have a few of the shafts that killed deer in my retired arrow bin. While not as tough and stable in terms of staying straight as my all time favorite grey dogwood (Cornus racimosa), swamp rose make a a very serviceable arrow shaft with similar weight to pine or compressed cedar. They tend to grow on the “clumps” in marshes and tamarack swamps, which are dangerous to walk in around here because of deep holes and floating bog conditions, so I would wait until after several days of the coldest below zero temps and then gather them by walking the ice and frozen peat.

loosanarrow - some cool info there! Swamp rose does have a very distinctive form that would make for great arrow shafts. Grey dogwood seems to put up almost perfectly straight suckers. I have made a few out of sourwood sprouts from a small tree that was bent over and tied down. The sprouts that come off of the trunk are super straight and make a good shaft.

Great as always Anthony, We have a lot of rosa rugosa here on the coast, they'll thrive in beach sand and have large hips, and come in red, pink and white flowers, are they not a native rose?,