Rosa sambucina Koidz.

An attractive, highly fragrant, vigorous climber, Rosa sambucina has been reintroduced as R. henryi in recent years, for example under [SICH] 1715, collected in Nanjiang County, Sichuan in 1996.

Bean’s text for Rosa henryi is not very clear or helpful, but is included here for completeness until Rosa is revised (JMG July 2024).

R. henryi, described in 1933, is essentially a renaming of the species treated in Plantae Wilsonianae, Vol. II, p. 312, under the name R. gentiliana (for the true species of that name, see under R. multiflora). As described, R. henryi does not seem to differ significantly from R. cerasocarpa, when allowance is made for the fact that the latter species was described from a single cultivated plant and R. henryi from a range of wild speciments. Boulenger would surely have noted the similarity if he had actually seen the specimens of Thistleton-Dyer’s plant, or even the plate in the Botanical Magazine, but he seems to have been unaware of either. His conception of R. cerasocarpa was largely based on a fruiting specimen collected by A. Henry (7007) which Rolfe thought might belong to his species, and it is perhaps significant that another specimen of Henry 7007, in the Boissier Herbarium, is included by Boulenger in R. henryi.R. henryi was introduced by Wilson in 1907 from W. Hupeh, China, under his numbers 609 and 609a. The nurseryman Paul of Cheshunt had plants, but whether he ever propagated and distributed this species is uncertain.