Rosa cerasocarpa Rolfe

A deciduous climbing or semi-climbing shrub up to 15 ft high; young shoots somewhat glaucous, armed with a few scattered recurved spines. Leaves up to 7 or 8 in. long, consisting of three or (usually) five leaflets; rachis glandular, slightly prickly. Leaflets narrowly ovate or oval, long pointed, sharply and conspicuously toothed, 2 to 4 in. long, half as much wide, glabrous of nearly so, rather glaucous beneath. Flowers white, produced in June in fine corymbose clusters 6 in. wide, each flower 11⁄2 in. across, borne on a glandular stalk 3⁄4 to 11⁄2 in. long. Receptacle obovoid, downy and glandular. Sepals linear, sometimes pinnately lobed, 1⁄2 in. long, downy and glandular. Fruits globose, downy, deep red, 1⁄2 in. wide, with the sepals fallen away. Bot. Mag., t. 8688.

R. cerasocarpa was described in 1915 from a plant which flowered for the first time in June 1914 in the garden of Sir William Thistleton-Dyer in Gloucestershire; it had been obtained by him from Sir Thomas Hanbury of La Mortola, Italy, and had been raised from seeds collected in China. In the following year it was figured in the Botanical Magazine, but Sir William considered that even that excellent portrait did not do justice to the beauty of his plant. ‘The solid trusses are unlike those of any rose I know, and suggest an Azalea’ (Gard. Chron., Vol. 74 (1923), p. 55). Whether this rose was ever propagated for general distribution it is impossible to say. It seems to be very near to R. rubus (q.v.) – nearer to that species than to R. longicuspis, with which Rolfe compared it.

The description of R. cerasocarpa in Boulenger’s revision of the Asiatic Synstylae is inaccurate, and the species is wrongly placed in his key among those with rounded flower-buds.