Rugosa Rose

What’s blooming in the area: Russian olive, tamarix, tea and pink shrub roses, Apache plume, honeysuckle, silver lace vine, cholla, prickly pear, yucca, daylily, fern and leather leaved globemallows, tumble mustard, alfalfa, purple loco, scurf pea, purple clover, licorice, milkweed, oxalis, Indian paintbrush, velvetweed, scarlet beeblossom, white evening primrose, stickleaf, nits and lice, datura, bindweed, bachelor button, perky Sue, Hopi tea, goatsbeard, hawkweed, hairy golden and strapleaf spine asters, native dandelion, needle, rice, June, brome, crab and three awn grasses; juniper berries; stickseed and needle grass seeds becoming a nuisance; more hay cut, some corn up.
What’s blooming in my yard, looking north: Fragrant catalpa, Dr Huey and miniature roses, red hot poker, golden-spur columbine, hartweg, Mexican hat, chocolate flower, coreopsis, blanket flower, anthemis, Moonshine yarrow; buds on butterfly weed, black-eyed Susan and Parker’s Gold yarrow.
Looking east: Floribundas, California poppy, hollyhock, winecup, coral bells, cheddar pink going to seed, snow-in-summer, small-leaved soapwort peaked, sea pink, Jupiter’s beard, snapdragons, coral beardtongue, Maltese cross, rock rose, pink evening primrose, pink salvia, Mount Atlas daisy; buds on bouncing Bess.
Looking south: Pasture, blaze, rugosa and rugosa hybrids, German iris, sweet pea; raspberries forming.
Looking west: Flax, catmint, Rumanian sage, blue salvia, purple and white beardtongues; buds on lilies and sea lavender.
Bedding plants: Moss rose, sweet alyssum, tomato.
Inside: South African aptenia and South American bougainvillea.

Animal sightings: Rabbit, brown and tan patterned snake, hummingbird, bird taking a cherry to eat, bumble bees, grasshoppers, mosquitoes, large black harvester and small dark ants.
Weather: Rain began Wednesday before dawn and again last night; afternoon winds and low morning temperatures continue; 15:56 hours of daylight today.
Weekly update: White rugosa roses blooming in my backyard have the simplest flowers, five petals surrounding concentric rings of yellow stamens. It’s hard to believe we have them from the Chinese who so artfully bred size and fullness into camillas and peonies, or that the Japanese who imported them from the mainland centuries ago left them alone.
Europeans, of course, began exploiting the crinkly-leaved shrubs as soon as hybridization became known in the 1880's with predictable results. The red F. J. Grootendorst my mother grew, a cross between a rugosa and a polyantha made by de Goey in the Netherlands, had little scent when it was released in 1919. A pink eponymous match between a rugosa and a wichurana nurtured by Max Graf was sterile when it was sold by his Pomfret Center, Connecticut, employer, James Bowditch, in 1919.
Perhaps the Chinese realized creating magnificent flowers often sacrificed other attributes and treated their useful plants differently than their ornamentals. In 1911, the American Presbyterian Mission in Shanghai published George Stuart’s report that mei gui had a cooling nature and was used to treat liver, spleen and blood problems. When he died, Stuart had been revising the 1871 work of Frederick Porter Smith who, in turn, had translated the herbal collection of a sixteenth century Ming physician and naturalist, Li Shi Zhen.
The rugosa is native to the flat, sandy shores of Lianoning and Shandong provinces, whose peninsulas separate the Bo Hai inlet from the Yellow Sea, and up through the lands north of Lianoning to Jilin, the Korean and Kamchatka peninsulas and some coastal islands including Sakhalin and Hokkaido. Li lived inland along the Yangtze river in Hubei, sandwiched between the two Bo Hai peninsulas.
In Korea, people still use haedangwha roots to treat diabetes, especially when simple protocols don’t work and treatments become complicated. Earlier, Charles Pickering reported the Ainu on the northern Japanese islands ate the red hips.
The cultural patterns that led different Asian groups to use or shun particular plant parts continue to stimulate research. Chinese biologists have found flower extracts indeed improve the liver and whole blood of deliberately aged mice, while some Hokkaido scientists have verified that pulverized hamanasu petals inhibit the growth of salmonella and E. coli in the intestine. Others working in Japan have found that rugosa extracts reverse liver and kidney damage in diabetic rats at the same time they improve "abnormal glucose metabolism that leads to oxidative stress."
Many believe the critical contribution of the rugosa is its ability to counteract the oxidant damage that occurs with aging and diseases like diabetes. Two Koreans have identified the active ingredient to be a special tannin found in the roots. Japanese researchers, who don’t believe the Hokkaido fruit of the minority Ainu is "fit to eat," have experimented with teas made with leaf tannins to introduce the plants’ antioxidants into the general diet.
Perhaps sometime in the distant past the Chinese did try to improve the magenta-colored species by selecting the largest flowers, the rarer colors of the recessive white Alba and the dominant red Rubra, maybe even nurturing the most fragrant, tastiest or most efficacious. They and others may also have expanded the original range to include places like Shandong, Hokkaido, and Korea.
Whatever they may have tried, the roses retained their fertility and rebred with their own and other nearby species to restore anything that may have been lost. The ones imported for the sandy wastes surrounding New England resorts like Newport, Nantucket and coastal Maine in the late nineteenth century are now spreading on their own and crossing with the local Rosa blanda along the Saint Lawrence. Even a Max Graf in Wilhelm Kordes’ nursery found a way to recover its virility by mating with a tea rose and doubling its offspring’s chromosomes.
A great deal can happen in a thousand years that leaves undisturbed the surface of white cups shimmering in the afternoon sun.
Notes:Cho, Eun Ju, T. Yokozawa, HyunYoung Kim, N. Shibahara, and Park Jong Cheol. "Rosa rugosa Attenuates Diabetic Oxidative Stress in Rats with Streptozotocin-induced Diabetes," American Journal of Chinese Medicine 32:487-96:2004Jeon, K. Y. and S. P. Mun. "Anti-hyperglycemic, Anti-hypertriglyceridemic and Stimulatory Effect on Glucose Transporter 4 Mrna Appearance of Hydrolysable Tannins (Rosanin) of the Rosa rugosa Root in the Streptozotocin-injected Diabetic Rats," Korean Journal of Medicine 58:180-188:2000.Manjiro, Kamijo, Kanazawa Tsutomu, Funaki Minoru, Nishizawa Makoto, and Yamagishi Takashi. "Effects of Rosa rugosa Petals on Intestinal Bacteria," Bioscience, Biotechnology, and Biochemistry 72:773-777:2008.Li, Shi Zhen. Ben Cao or Pen Ts'ao, 1578.Nagai, Takeshi, Taro Kawashima, Nobutaka Suzuki, Yasuhiro Tanoue, Norihisa Kai, and Toshio Nagashima. "Tea Beverages Made from Romanas Rose (Rosa rugosa Thunb.) Leaves Possess Strongly Antioxidant Activity by High Contents of Total Phenols and Vitamin C," Journal of Food, Agriculture and Environment 5:137-141:2007.Ng, T. B., W. Gao, L. Li, S. M. Niu, L. Zhao, J. Liu, L. S. Shi, M. Fu and F. Lu. "Rose (Rosa rugosa) - Flower Extract Increases the Activities of Antioxidant Enzymes and the Gene Expression and Reduces Lipid Peroxidation," Biochemistry and Cell Biology 83:78-85:2005.Pickering, Charles. Chronological History of Plants, 1879, cited by Edward Lewis Sturtevant in Sturtevant’s Edible Plants of the World, edited by U. P. Hedrick, 1919, reprinted by Dover Publications, 1972.Stuart, George Arthur. Chinese Materia Medica, 1911, reprinted by Gordon Press, 1977.Uhm, Dong-Chun and Young-Shin Lee. "A Study of the Application of Folk Medicine in Patients with Diabetes Mellitus," East-West Nursing Research 1:72-81:1997.

Photograph: Rosa rugosa ‘Alba’ around 3:30 in the afternoon, 7 June 2009.