Rosehips

Inspired by yesterday’s gallery of the reserve’s berries and fruit, Sarah, a long-term member of FoSCP, has sent in pictures of the spectacular crop of rosehips near Lambrok Bridge.

These are the fruits of the dog roses (Rosa canina), which grow in our hedges and edges and in the old filled-in pond at the end of Lambrok Meadow. The roses, pink and fragrant, flower in June and the hips ripen in the late summer and autumn, a splash of bright red as the days get darker and colder.

The sweet outer layer of the fruit is there to attract birds and small mammals, which carry the seeds away from the parent plant. The seeds inside the hip are hairy and act as an irritant, one of many devices that plants use to hurry their seeds through a browser’s stomach before the fierce digestive juices can damage them.

When FoSCP were children, a long, long time ago, we used to call those irritating hairy seeds itching powder and we put them down inside the collar of the poor child sitting at the desk in front. Those were the days!