After harvesting, rinse them very carefully to avoid bruising, and lay them flat to dry. The more fragrant blossoms will be the tastiest. Scent is closely related to favor, and roses are no exception. (Note to friends I have and haven’t met yet: if you invite me to defile your rose bushes, I’ll thank you with deliciously scented treats.)Ĭhoose petals that are still fresh and unmarred. I don’t harvest from private property unless I’ve been invited and I know that no chemicals were used on the plants. Beverly Gray, author of The Boreal Herbal has an important note: “When taking the flowers, leave one petal behind to ensure there’s a landing strip for bees so the flower can be pollinated, which will allow a hip to develop.” Even so, I stick with my 10% rule for bountiful foraging: don’t take more than 10% in any one area. You can be relatively liberal harvesting petals because they are about to fall off anyway, and their harvest doesn’t affect future growth of the plant. Roses are often found on roadsides, but look for bushes that are a little off the well-driven path to avoid eating exhaust and other contaminants that the delicate flowers might have absorbed. Since they have no caffeine, and they don’t have a strong flavor or fragrance, you might want to mix them with rose petals or another flavorful plant for a refreshing tisane. Author Leda Meredith says that the leaves can be used in tea and have plenty of tannins, which gives them a bit of a black tea mouth feel. Some foragers like to peel and eat the spring shoots as a snack. Happily, much of the rose plant is edible. Other wild varieties have smaller grape-like rosehips. You can tell the Sitka rose easily after the hips form because they are big and round, tomato-like. The most common are the Arctic rose (rosa acicularis) up north, Nootka rose or wild rose (rosa nutkana) in coastal areas, and the Sitka rose, a variety of rosa rugosa that was introduced to Southeast Alaska in the early 20th century. Roses of several varieties are native to or naturalized in Alaska, and you can find them growing wild across much of the state. It’s a wild foods crush, and recently I had it bad for roses. Each foraging season, I have a tendency to “go deep” into one wild edible, trying every variation I can think of.
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