One of the larger plant groups is the rose family, which includes many familiar fruits (apple, pear, plum, raspberry, strawberry, cherry) and useful herbs.
Not only the well-known rose hips (the berry-like fruits of the many varieties of rose) but also raspberry leaf, agrimony, and lady’s mantle are used as healing herbs. Plants in the rose family have several characteristics in common:
1. Five petals. Like many other groups, the rose family has flowers with five petals.
2. Many stamens. Rose flowers are distinguished by the presence of many stamens, or male parts—the fine stalks that stick up in the center of the flower. According to Thomas J. Elpel’s excellent book “Botany in a Day” (HOPS Press, 1996), rose flowers have at least five stamens but often many more, usually in multiples of five. He adds, “Domestic roses have additional petals that were bred from the stamens.”
3. Oval, serrated leaves. Not all rose family plants share this feature, but it is often a clue to the identity of rose family plants. Strawberry leaflets are typical.
4. Stipules. These small leaf-like structures or tiny tendrils are located at the bases of the leaf stems and found in all subfamilies except Spiraea.
5. Astringent leaves. Most plants in the family are astringent, with the medicinal function of pulling tissues together to improve their integrity and tone. Chewing on an astringent leaf tends to produce a dry feeling in the mouth, as if all the saliva is being sucked away.
A common wild rose is the highly invasive Rosa multiflora, which forms tall thickets with small, backward-curving thorns and delicate white flowers that bloom in early summer, casting their fragrance out over the roads and meadows. Its hips, or berries, are small and thin-skinned, but they may be harvested in the fall, when they turn deep red, and dried for tea. Other species, such as dogrose, Rosa canina, have larger, fleshier, and sweeter hips, which are used more often in commerce.
The hips stay on the bushes all winter, providing food for overwintering birds and nibbles for the human wanderer. The seeds are nourishing, containing a large proportion of the hips’ vitamins C and E, but they tend to be too bitter to eat, unlike the sweet-sour red flesh. The whole hip may be used in tea or tincture for heat, swelling, auto-immune excess, digestive irritation, or respiratory inflammation where there is a runny nose and perhaps a sore throat. The flowers may also be used.
Most raspberries and blackberries (Rubus species) flower in spring and fruit in summer, but there is one species, the purple-flowering raspberry, whose large, exotic, five-petalled, magenta flowers bloom in spring along roadsides and in thickets. The soft, dome-shaped, dusky red fruits ripen in early fall. They are delicious, although the seeds are larger and crunchier than those of regular raspberries.
Both raspberry and blackberry leaves may be dried (best just before flowering, but okay to harvest at other times) for a nourishing tea and for use as a women’s tonic, especially during pregnancy. The finely toothed leaflets occur in threes or fives, in a palmate arrangement (the leaflet stems all meeting at the stalk), unlike rose leaves which are pinnate (with rows of leaflets lining the leaf stems). While roses have backward-curving thorns, Rubus thorns are straight.
For more information on plant families, see The Mint Family and The Mustard Family.
