Rose Flowers and Plants for Rose Lovers
The Hardhack or Steeple Bush Rose, Spiraea tomentosa, usually has pink or magenta flowers. On rare occasions it can produce white flowers though. The flowers are very small and packed into dense pyramidal clusters. This rose plant grows two to three feet tall and tends to be shrub-like. The leaves are dark green on the top, and covered with whitish woolly hairs on the underside. They have a saw edge and grow between one and two inches long.
This rose likes to grow in low moist ground, roadside ditches, or swamps. It blooms from July to September and likes climates such as those found in Nova Scotia, Georgia and Kansas.
These bright spires of pink bloom are quite attractive to humans as well as flies, beetles and bees. The Steeple bush is closely related to the feecy White Meadow Sweet which can often be found growing near it in the wild. The pink spires on that plant, which bloom from the top downward, have pale brown tips where the withered flowers are, toward the end of
summer.
The Purple-Flowering Or Virginia Raspberry (Rubus odoratus) is also part of the Rose family. This wild flower has royal purple or bluish black, showy, fragrant flowers that are one to two inches wide. The plant itself grows from three to five feet tall with many branches. It’s actually a shrubby, bristly plant but it’s not prickly. It has lots of leaves that grow in bunches of three to five. The leaves are lobed shaped and the middle lobe is the largest. Sometimes the leaves can grow to be a full foot wide.
This wild flower produces a red berry and likes to live in rocky woods, dells, and shady roadsides. It flowers from June to August and does well from Northern Canada south to Georgia, westward to Michigan and Tennessee.
To be an unappreciated, unloved relative of the exquisite wild rose, with which this flower is so often likened, must be a similar misfortune to being the untalented son of a great man, or the unhappy author of a successful first book never equaled in later attempts. But where the bright blossoms of the Virginia raspberry burst forth above the roadside tangle and shady woodland dells, even those who despise magenta see beauty in them where abundant green tones all discordant notes into harmony. Purple, as we of today understand the color, the flower is not; but rather the purple of ancient Orientals. On cool, cloudy days the petals are a deep, clear purplish rose, that soon fades and dulls with age, or changes into pale, bluish pink when the sun is hot.
Queen-Of-The-Prairie (Ulmaria rubra; Spirea lobata of Gray) is another wild flower in the Rose family. It has deep pink, fragrant flowers resembling peach blossoms. The flowers are only about one-third an inch wide and grow in clusters. The plant grows from two to eight feet tall with many branches. The leaves stay primarily near the ground and are large: about three feet long. They grow in groups of three to seven.
This wild shrub likes to grow in moist meadows and prairies, and blooms from June to July. Agreeable climates include Western Pennsylvania to Michigan and Iowa, and southward.
A stately, beautiful native plant, seen to perfection where it rears bright panicles of bloom above the ranker growth in the low moist meadows of the Ohio Valley. Butterflies and bees pay grateful homage to this queen. Indeed, butterflies appear to have a special fondness for pink, as bees have for blue flowers. Cattle also like to chew the leaves, which, when crushed, give out a fragrance like sweet birch.
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