Rose hips are mostly an ornamental second display from Autumn into Winter, but all rose hips are edible if you want to go through the trouble of preparing them
And almost all roses will make hips if they get pollinated and you allow them to develop, which is not usually the case with a typical Hybrid Tea or Floribunda garden rose because it gets deadheaded and pruned.
So the roses covered in hips each year tend to have simple, open flowers such as wild native roses like dog rose, a typical component of our mixed hedge packs.
- Rosa rugosa Ramanas Roses have huge hips in bright colours with good flavour, but they have a lot of hairs inside to remove first.
- Rosa glauca sports plum tomato type hips, and is often grown as a shrub.
- Rambling roses flower once in Summer, and can be left untrimmed until their hips have faded/fallen; Rambling Rector has tiny oval orange hips, and the floriferous Wedding Day and pale pink Paul’s Himalayan Musk both hip up nicely.
- Among the climbers, the sorbet Paul’s Lemon Pillar produces lovely hips.
- The best shrub roses fopr hips include red Geranium, pink Felicia, apricot Buff Beauty, white Penelope, and Rosa mundi, and deep velvet red Tuscany Superb.
Rose hips are a standard ingredient in our hedgerow jelly, and because I haven’t made one earlier I’ll send you to the BBC for a plain Rose Hip Jam Recipe.
