“Eglantine”: the very word conjures up an English summer. Shakespeare, Shelley, Pre-Raphaelite paintings — the eglantine is there, with its soft pink petals and candid white eye, breathing out its faint apple-breath. Titania’s bower in A Midsummer Night’s Dream was “over-canopied with luscious woodbine, With sweet musk roses, and with eglantine”. Eglantine is part of the dream landscape in Shelley’s The Question, with “green cow-bind and the moonlight-coloured may”. Elizabeth I adopted it as one of her personal emblems.
This is Rosa rubiginosa, formerly R. eglanteria. Its other English name is the sweet briar. It is native to the whole of the British Isles, though commonest south of the Wash, where it seems to favour the chalk. It has stiff bright green little leaves which smell of apples, especially after rain. Graham Stuart Thomas recommended planting it on a south or west boundary, so that summer’s prevailing south-west winds would waft the scent over the garden. Or you could plant it as a hedge alongside a path or drive, so that you can rub a leaf or two in your fingers as you pass. Clipped, it will form a dense and impenetrable hedge. Left to its own devices, it can reach 2.5 to 3m (8-10ft), and as much across. It is also armed with stout thorns. Surely this was the briar through which the Prince fought his way to reach Sleeping Beauty?
Elizabeth I used the eglantine as an image of her tough native Englishness in the face of the Spanish threat, in much the same way that her grandfather Henry VII used the Tudor Rose at the end of the Wars of the Roses as a symbol of reconcilation. Her portraits, clothes and jewellery (such as the Phoenix Jewel in the British Museum, where she appears in profile, surrounded with a wreath of roses) often incorporate eglantines, and the praises of contemporary poets are liberally sprinkled with them too. In a masque performed in her honour at Theobalds in Hertfordshire, in 1591, one character observes of the eglantine that “The deeper it is rooted in the ground, the sweeter it smelleth in the flower, making it ever so green that the sun of Spain at the hottest cannot parch it” — a reference to Elizabeth’s defeat of the Spanish invasion fleet three years earlier.
There is also an interesting Scottish connection. There are a dozen or so hybrid eglantines — generally with larger flowers or a few more petals — which bear the names of heroines from the novels of Sir Walter Scott: Catherine Seyton, for example (soft pink with prominent gold stamens), appears in The Abbot, Edith Bellenden (rose-pink) in Old Mortality, Flora McIvor (deep pink with a white eye) in Waverley, and Meg Merrilies (bright crimson semi-double) in Guy Mannering. Collectively they are known as the Penzance sweet briars, after the name of their raiser, Lord Penzance. He was a judge in the Court of Probate and Divorce, and took to rose breeding in 1872 after a lifetime on the bench. They are all splendidly healthy roses, with the curious exception of the two he named after himself and his wife (both with a hint of coppery-yellow), which tend to be subject to black spot.
Not all the hybrid eglantines have the same deliciously scented foliage as the species (though the ones listed above do). I have a little collection of them growing in a tunnel arbour along one side of my Wild Garden. I love the dappled shade of it, and the scattering of crimson petals on the floor. The tunnel is made of bent hazel poles, and is given an extra sense of occasion by the fact that it runs along the top of a raised walk, like a viewing platform. I enjoy the touch of artificiality that the eglantines provide, with their more vivid colouring framing the waving sea of long grass and the mounds of paler more discreet wild roses below. They provide a transition from the cultivated part of the garden to the Wild Garden, gently changing the mood.
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Transitions in the garden can be tricky. Sometimes you want people to come round a corner and exclaim “Oh how lovely!” — to take them by surprise. But sometimes you want to provide a gentler transition, for people to linger — to give them little glimpses of what is to come. And a tunnel arbour like this is just the thing: less formal than a pergola, quicker and easier to make, certainly cheaper, and with its own quirky irregularity.
A final word about names: David Austin’s English Rose called Eglantyne is a double-flowered garden shrub rose, a pretty rose in its own right, but named apparently after Eglantyne Jebb, founder of Save the Children. It has nothing to do with either R. rubiginosa or Lord Penzance and his sweet briars.
katherine.swift@thetimes.co.uk