Rosa × polliniana Spreng.

A hybrid between R. arvensis and R. gallica, occurring occasionally in the wild; it was first recorded by the Italian botanist Pollini growing at the foot of Monte Baldo in northern Italy. The stand most frequented by the French rhodologists of the 19th century grew near Lyons, and many names were given to the forms that occurred in it. It has also been found in Switzerland, Germany, N. Yugoslavia, etc. It is a variable hybrid, partly no doubt because the parents are variable, partly, according to Crépin, because the products of the cross are fertile.

The date of introduction of R. × polliniana is uncertain, but it was cultivated by Canon Ellacombe at the Bitton Vicarage in the 1880s as R. hybrida. The clone now cultivated makes a spreading, mounded shrub or a climber, its stems armed with a few short curved prickles. Leaflets three or five, to about 2 in. long, elliptic, oblong-elliptic or slightly obovate, coarsely toothed. Flowers appearing at midsummer, fragrant, blush-coloured from pink buds, about 2 in. across, borne in terminal cymes supplemented by flowers from the upper leaf-axils. Pedicels up to 11⁄2 in. long, glandular. Sepals smooth on the back, variable in length, the longer ones expanded at the apex, with a few lateral appendages. Styles long-exserted, the stigmas almost at the same level as the anthers. Willmott, The Genus Rosa, p. 333, t.