As you see, there are many rose hips on one rose bush. And there are many dormant rose bushes near my house, so I will probably take more close ups of rose hips until about April. The next one I see that looks like a Volkswagen or a ham sandwich I promise not to inflict on you. Not unless it’s very, very inspiring.
A Bad Guide 
We used to collect rosehips at the weekend and hand them in at school on Mondays. They’d be weighed and the weight recorded; we were paid according to the weight and, when the season finished, you’d get a lapel badge if your cumulative harvest exceeded a threshold. Happy days.
But I’ve probably recounted this before. If so, apols.
I was given rose hip syrup as a child; I liked it a lot, it was very good. I’ve forgotten the whole story, but I remember reading somewhere (possibly the LRB) that during WW2 as part of “the war effort”, Britons collected rose hips to be made industrially into a vitamin C supplement to the national diet. It was collected by the lorry-load in villages across the nation. The revelation made in the article was that it was good for morale, but the rose hips actually contained very little vitamin C.
According to Frank Kermode, there’s a Saxon recipe for rose hip and onion soup. It sounds reasonable, but unfortunately I can’t get access to it.
Lovely story, d & ajp, I had no idea. It’s always so moving for me the things you did during WWII.
Beautiful pictures! They look like tiny octopuses. Handicapped octopuses…
Yes, they’re octopus amputees. I really did very little worth mentioning, during WW2.
Rose hips do have vitamin C, but the amount varies according to the species. Apparently the Rosa rugosa species in Western Canada has the highest content (as well as the most prickles on the stems). I think that this is the species used for road dividers (planted in a strip dividing two sides of a road), but I would not pick fruit that is constantly exposed to car exhaust.
I tried to make rose hip jam once, but in spite of several attempts using more and more pectin it turned out like a thin syrup. Good, but definitely thin. Plus, picking out the seeds from inside each fruit before cooking is a thankless task, so I gave up on making another attempt.
There’s a lot of Rosa rugosa here, it’s very hardy. They graft other roses on to rugosa roots because of their hardiness. Thanks for the jam tip. Do you still make other jams?
I guess Rosa rugosa must do well in Norway as the climate is probably similar.
I have not made jam for a long time, but one of my best memories is of the time I bought 40 pounds of apricots from a door to door vendor and spent a week making apricot jam (my favourite): I did not have a very large pot, and the apricots were in varying stages of ripening, so I started with the ripest ones (eating some too), and by the end of the week I had done them all.
That’s a lot of apricot jam – depending on how many you ate, of course.
And, you can split a rosehip with your thumbnail, remove the seeds, and chew the flesh. Then on Monday at school, you can use the seeds as an “itching powder”.
Another tip. Thanks, I’m almost out of itching powder.
Rosa rugosa thrives along the southeastern Massachusetts seacoast, too — an area with I think a milder climate than where AJP lives.
Dearieme, your method works but is pretty hard on the fingertips.
Sorry, m-l; maybe our local dog roses had particularly accommodating hips.
May I dehyphenate that? ‘dog roses’.
You may – or I shall.
We’d be the same as that yellow, zone 7 – our average annual min. is about 5F (-15C).
Here are hardiness zones for us – a scroll down takes you to a discussion of Vikingland.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardiness_zone#Britain_and_Ireland_Hardiness_Zones
I just assumed it was colder where Crown lives. We’re zone 6, but where the roses are it’s zone 7.
From dearie’s chart, we’re 6.
Department of “you can say that again”: “…comparing the Shetland Islands and southern Alabama, which are both on the boundary of zones 8 and 9 and share the same winter minima, but little else in their climates”.
Yes, they’ve got Tromsø and Milan in the same category (7). Something wrong there. Tromsø has some very fashionable boutiques, according to my wife, but she says it’s called the Paris of the North. (And like all these comparisons, I’ve never heard Paris called the Tromsø of the South.)
I once described Venice as “The Kirkcudbright of the Adriatic”. Unfortunately it turned out that my chums had never visited Kirkcudbright.
Hamburg is known to Hamburgers as the Venice of the North, but perhaps the Kirkcudbright of the East would be more apt. Amsterdam, Kirkcudbright on the Rhine.
Vagrant
by Richard Murphy
Who is tapping on my study window
At this late hour tonight
Disturbing the calm yellow pool
Of light on the unfinished page?
If only it were the fingers
Of one who will never come home.
Draw back the curtain
And look your loneliness in the eyes:
Wind is thrashing on the glass
The scarlet hips of a rose.
A beautiful poem, Jim. We have rose hips tapping on the glass of our living room. Thanks!
Scarlet hips ? Being thrashed in public, no wonder they blush.
Would it be fair to say that roses are slim-hipped ? Recently I haven’t been able to get out of my mind the expression “slim-hipped”, the occasion for marital discord in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, the play by Edward Albee in the ’60s. I read it at an impressionable age.
I was too young at the time to enter the discussion of that play. I just remember Liz Taylor & Richard Burton were its stars on screen and I got them, and Virginia Woolf herself, all mixed up. They’ve been like that in my mind ever since, to some extent; I still think of her a little bit as a wolf, occasionally.
Slim-hipped is a compliment in our age and broad-hipped the opposite.
Me, too. As a child I knew Virginia Woolf only from the phrase “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? – a play by Edward Albee” which was on the spine of a book in our house. In my head the phrase is set to music.
How was it that in the ’60s so many middle-class households in America harbored a copy of that play ? All I remember is that it is about two couples bickering – but was there a plot or (God help us) a message ? Was there something that (pardon my French: heterosexual) people “related to” then, as with Kramer vs. Kramer a little later ? I always see these things as if from a great distance, like a mountain climber surveying the plains.
Reading the very good Wikipedia page I find you’re quite right, stew, surveying the plains. It does sound like Kramer vs Kramer, Part I. Or maybe Part II. I liked Kramer, but I’d run a mile before I’d see this; it must be torture watching these people yelling at each other drunkenly for hours, and I dislike theatrical throwing-up nearly as much as I hate the real thing.
Here’s an interesting paragraph about the foolishness of censorship:
I saw the Virginia Woolf movie the first year I was in the US, and I did not understand all the words, or the social context, but it was unpleasant to watch: two dysfunctional couples, the older one especially, tearing each other and the younger couple apart. According to the Wikipedia article (thank you AJP), the older characters are supposed to be based on an actual couple, “friends” of the author – but who could be real friends with those kinds of people, who are both self-centered and eager to spill their private life in public? Their only redeeming feature is that the woman’s dysfunction and denial of reality results from her inability to have children, but they are both thoroughly unpleasant. The young couple are less distasteful because of their age and inexperience, but you wonder if they are heading that way too, since they mirror the older couple at a generation’s distance (academic husband, dependent wife unable to conceive and drowning her sorrows in alcohol).
Thinking about it decades later, I think the work could be seen as a pre-feminist illustration of the “nuclear family ideal” gone bad – the woman’s only possible social role unfulfilled, the husband a disappointment to himself and to her both professionally and personally, but both partners unable to get out of the situation. Perhaps what is why it was so popular: no doubt many couples told themselves “we may have our problems, but we are not as bad as those two”, while only dimly aware of the strict societal patterns which could lead to such dramas.
I think the nuclear family is becoming a thing of the past. Nowadays there are more and more quark families.