Prickly rose
Rosa acicularis
Also called Wild rose, Rose hips
We do not have a Blackfoot or Cree name for this one yet. Tell us the name and we will add it, with your word on where it comes from.
Alberta’s provincial flower, and a shrub that gives food twice: petals in summer and hips through the winter. The hips hold on through the cold and are sweetest after a hard frost.
Commonly shared knowledge. Learn it, gather it, and follow the protocol.
Take care
- The hairs around the seeds inside a hip are a genuine irritant to the mouth and gut. Scrape them out, or strain the tea well.
What it is confused with
Easily confusedWoods rose and other wild roses Rosa woodsii
Also a wild rose and used the same way. Telling the species apart matters to botanists, not to a person gathering hips.
How to know it
- Prickles
- Dense fine straight prickles all along the stems, not the big hooked thorns of a garden rose.
- Leaves
- Divided into five to seven toothed leaflets arranged along a central stalk, with a single leaflet at the tip.
- Flowers
- Five pink petals, single, lightly scented, from late spring into early summer.
- Hips
- Round to pear-shaped scarlet fruit that persists through the winter, with dry sepals still attached at the tip.
The country it grows in
- Aspen parkland
- Coulee slopes
- Riverbanks and willow flats
- Foothills and shrubland
- Roadsides and disturbed ground
Landscape types only. We do not publish where a patch is, and we are not going to.
When it is ready
- Flowers June to July
- Berries September to FebruaryBest after the first hard frost, and available right through the winter.
Right now it is July. Something on this plant is in season.
What it is used for
- Food and drink
- Breathing and colds
- Teaching with youth
Hips are eaten and made into tea, and are a well-known source of vitamin C through the winter when little else is available.
Petals are eaten fresh and used as a scent.
How it is prepared
- Tea
Split hips, scrape out the seeds and hairs, and steep the flesh in hot water.
- Food
The outer flesh of the hip is eaten fresh or dried. Petals are eaten as they are.
- Dried and stored
Dry hips whole and keep them in a jar. Deseed them before use.
Protocol
Ask the plant first, and offer something before you take anything. Tobacco is what is most often offered here. Say who you are, and say what the medicine is for.
Harvest the mature plants and leave the small ones to grow. Never take the first plant you find, and never take all of them.
Take only what you will actually use. Medicine picked and then left to rot in a bag was taken for nothing.
Leave the ground as you found it. Put back any dirt you dug up, and return any plant material you do not use to the earth.
Do not gather beside roads, highways or trails, where the plants take up whatever has been sprayed or spilled there.
If you are not certain what a plant is, do not pick it and do not put it in your mouth. Ask someone. Being wrong in the field is how people get hurt.
Leave plenty of hips on the bush. They are what carries birds and small animals through the winter here.