Rosaceae
Rosa canina
Dog rose · Rosehip
- Part used
- fruitseed
- Native range
- Europe, north-west Africa and western Asia; naturalised and weedy in Australia and New Zealand
- Morphology
- An arching thorny shrub to three metres with pinnate leaves and pale pink five-petalled flowers, followed by scarlet oval hips containing seeds surrounded by irritant hairs.
What is in it
Evidence
Meta-analyses of standardised rosehip powder report modest reductions in osteoarthritis pain, attributed to a galactolipid. The effect is small but consistent, which is more than most entries here manage.
Safety
A food. The hairs inside the hip are a mechanical irritant and were the basis of commercial itching powder — preparations must be filtered. Very high vitamin C content is relevant only at extreme intake.
Regulatory: Permitted as a food and as a listed ingredient.
How the traditions classify it
Three systems, rating the same plant. Where they disagree, none of them is correcting the others — they are separate frameworks that arrived at their categories independently.
Historical use
Gathered across Europe as a food and a source of vitamin C. British children were organised to collect hips during the Second World War when citrus imports stopped, and National Rosehip Syrup was distributed to prevent scurvy.
Recorded as history and attributed where possible. Long use establishes that a plant was widely used, not that it worked, and not that it was safe.
Worth knowing
Rosehip is one of the few entries where the traditional gathering practice and modern nutrition science met formally, and the state organised the result.
When German submarine warfare cut Britain's citrus imports, the Ministry of Health ran a programme in which schoolchildren and volunteers collected wild rosehips — hundreds of tonnes of them — to be made into National Rosehip Syrup and distributed against scurvy. Wild plants were a public health intervention, at scale, within living memory.
Its modern evidence is unrelated to the vitamin C. The osteoarthritis effect is attributed to a galactolipid, and is one of the more consistent small findings in this collection.
Nomenclature verified against GBIF backbone taxonomy.