June 10, 2018
Pacific Northwest
We have two kinds of wild roses in my neighborhood. The vigorous Nootka roses revel in full light, and hence are abundant on roadsides, in fields, by the beach, encroach onto lawns, and will form thickets unless actively chopped back. The other rose prefers shady woods with filtered sunlight and intertwines its spindly prickly canes with other understory shrubs like salal, snowberry, oceanspray, twinberry and vines of dewberry or honeysuckle. Its small pink flowers smell as sweet as the Nootka’s but there are so many fewer you have to get quite close to catch their fragrance.
The Daily Bucket is a nature refuge. We amicably discuss animals, weather, climate, soil, plants, waters and note life’s patterns.
We invite you to note what you are seeing around you in your own part of the world, and to share your observations in the comments below.
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June is rose month in the PNW. Right now the Wood Rose, Rosa gymnocarpa, is starting to transition from flowers to fruits. Several stages are visible today.
Many kinds of insects pollinate rose flowers. Most often I see bees and flies.
Baldhip rose is an important year-round food source for mammals, birds, and insects. In the Pacific Northwest, white-tailed deer and mule deer browse baldhip rose especially in burned areas The fruits (hips) persist throughout the winter, and are eaten by small mammals, birds, and insects. nativeplantspnw.com/…
The aggregate fruit of the rose is a berry-like structure called a rose hip. Many domestic rose cultivars do not produce hips, as the flowers are so tightly petalled that they do not provide access for pollination. Each hip comprises an outer fleshy layer which contains 5–160 "seeds” embedded in a matrix of fine, but stiff, hairs. en.m.wikipedia.org/...
The Wood Rose is also called the Baldhip because all the spent sepals, stamens and stigma parts drop off the hip, leaving it “bald”. The Wood Rose hip is also pear shaped rather than round, another way to distinguish it from the Nootka Rose’s.
Bucket’s open for your nature observations.
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