Large Rose Hips

In Albums: food fruit

Jul 12th, 2011, by Alex Zorach

This photo shows large rose hips that I gathered from rose plants at the southwest end of the woodland walk in West Philadelphia.

I have read that rose hips are very high in Vitamin C, but that they are usually too sour to be eaten alone, and are instead cooked and made into jelly or mixed with other foods. However, these rose hips were an exception: they were very sweet and so big that they were good to eat fresh. These rose hips have many seeds in the interior, but once the seeds are removed, they have a delightfully sweet flesh that is sweet enough to eat as a fruit. The only downsides, besides the seeds, is that the skin can be rather tough, but they can be peeled. I recommend slicing them and removing the seeds before biting into one of them so that you don't get a mouthful of seeds.

I'm not an expert on rose identification but I am pretty sure that these are from Rosa rugosa, or beach rose, a species from Asia that has become widely naturalized in the U.S., and is sometimes considered invasive.