The first and the last wild rose

 Burnet rose Rosa pimpinellifolia is always the first wild rose to come into bloom, in late May, and also the last the continue blooming; I have found it in flower on Christmas day in years when the winter is mild. It's currently putting on a fine early-autumn display at my local nature reserve, Durham Wildlife Trust's Low Barns reserve at Witton-le-Wear. On a chilly autumn day just one sniff of its intense scent takes me right back to warm summer afternoons.

Rosa pimpinellifolia is the prickliest of all the wild roses and the easiest to identify, because the hips ripen to deep purple and then to black as autumn progresses. It's most often found on coastal sites, in sea cliffs and sand dunes, but there are a few places in Weardale where it grows in hedgerows. Some of these are close to habitation, which may be a reflection of it being cultivated in the past and then escaping back into the wild. These days, most gardeners would find it too invasive because it suckers freely, but cultivars known as Scotch roses have been grown for centuries, as Rosa spinosissima.

Roses, noses and bathtime

It's wild rose time and the most fragrant British species by far is burnet rose Rosa pimpinellifolia. It has a strange distribution here in Country Durham - mostly coastal but with a few inland populations - perhaps because people planted it in their gardens in the past. This one was photographed at Durham Wildlife Trust's Low Barns Nature Reserve.

We live in an age dominated by visual images, especially on the internet, but wild flowers can engage all the senses, and especially the sense of smell. A few years ago I found this book -The Scented Wild Flowers of Britain by Roy Genders - in a second-hand bookshop and it opened up a new dimension in botanising. It's not just flowers that are scented - leaves and roots of many species also have their own distinctive aroma.

The problem is that having reached three score years and five my sense of smell isn't as acute as it once was - and the fragrance of  many species is quite subtle. Just sniffing the flower when its scent is diluted by the passing breeze isn't enough. So that's why I always carry ......

... a small, screw-top plastic tube. If you just put the flower (in this case red clover which has a delicious peppery sweetness) in this enclosed space for a few minutes the volatile fragrance is concentrated in a small volume of air and is very easy to detect. For leaves, crushing them before you put them in the tube releases the scent much more efficiently.

Fragrances famously stimulate the memory and recollection of past experiences. For me the scent of this plant, meadow rue Thalictrum flavum, brings back memories of bathing our children when they were babies, nearly forty years ago. Its flowers have a comforting, slightly antiseptic smell that mimics the fragrance of the brand of baby talcum powder that we used on them. These days I find it quite difficult to detect the smell of the flower in the open air but when I enclose it in the plastic tube for a minute or two it immediately becomes apparent.

The First and Last Rose of Summer

Burnet rose Rosa pimpinellifolia is the most fragrant of all the British wild roses and also the first to come into bloom - sometimes in mid-May - and now it has come back into bloom in a hedgerow here at Wolsingham in Weardale.

There's been a lot in the press recently about the heat-wave inducing spring flowers to produce a repeat performance in October but it's not really that uncommon. Primroses, for example, quite often produce a few flowers in early autumn. For any species whose flowering is triggered by daylength, the hours of daylight are more-or-less similar now to those that the plant would have experienced in spring, so it's just responding weakly to the environmental stimulus that switches it into flowering mode. Spring-blooming wild flowers are more likely to produce an autumn encore if they experience in growth check in summer - maybe drought or low temperatures - that's followed by favourable conditions that allow resumption of rapid growth in late summer. I've noticed this particularly in some trees after a summer drought - somewhere I have some photos of rowans producing flowers alongside ripening berries in late summer, when rain after a drought has triggered a resumption in growth.

Essence of Summer

June is the month for wild roses - and none is more fragrant that the burnet rose Rosa pimpinellifolia. It's the first wild rose to flower, beginning in late May, and produces deep purple rose hips that ripen almost to black. Burnet rose is also incredibly spiney, with a mixture of large prickles and smaller bristlly spines that lodge in your flesh, as I discovered today when I tried to restrict the growth of a plant in my garden.

Burnet rose flowers are normally creamy-white but a few years ago I took a small cutting from a plant growing on sand dunes on the Northumbrian coast which has petals with attractive magenta flecks. It has since flourished in our dry garden soil and the fragrance is fabulous, but it has sent out long runners under paths that have sprouted an ever-widening forest of prickly shoots. Left unchecked, it would probably take over half of the garden but removing it is a painful process, even with gardening gloves..

Burnet rose is first and foremost a coastal species in Durham, although there are some inland populations. This one was photographed on the cliffs at Dawdon in County Durham last week. In Northumberland many of the plants growing in the coastal dunes are much shorter. It's a plant I always associate with summer trips to the seaside, and judging by its invasive tendencies in my garden it's best left in its native habitat.