Today we are continuing with the theme of old-fashioned garden plants that are particularly associated with Finnish midsummer! This rose is more common than the peony in my previous post and is still sold regularly in garden stores. It’s more surprising to see an established garden here without one than with. Ours came with the house and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was one of the original plants in the garden.

If there’s one thing I can say about Rosa pimpinellifolia ‘Plena’ aka the midsummer rose (Juhannusruusu), it is that it does exactly what it says on the label. By the second half of June every year, it is reliably covered in pretty little semi-doubled flowers that perfume the air for several meters in every direction. The pollinators go nuts for them and it’s magical to see the better part of an entire wall covered in creamy white roses.

Except. Of course there’s an except.

Except that, this thing is a very big, very mature specimen. We have shorter fruit trees. It’s also wide. Sprawling. The plant description states that it should be between one to two meters tall but I’m pretty sure ours is just short of three. It’s about that wide as well. I saw one webpage that described it as “thicket-forming” and might have snorted laughing. My only consolation is that it has most certainly reached the upper limit of its growth potential.

Also, it has an annoying habit of turning crispy and brown by July and then sitting around looking very sorry for itself for weeks on end. It’s amazingly tolerant of all kinds of weather, though, and is back to its lush self within a week of good rain.

To be fair, the complaints I have about this plant are mostly our fault for never having pruned or cared for the thing since moving in here. If you had something that big and spiney, though, you’d have second thoughts about going near it without heavy-duty tools and armor too. This is problematic because we now have a giant hedge of thorns, a la Sleeping Beauty’s enchanted castle, blocking the emergency exit ladder. While I’m sure none of us would have qualms about kicking aside a spikey shrub if there was a fire, it’s still not a situation I’d like to find ourselves in.

I suppose what all this comes down to is that my to-do list now has “cut back monster rose thicket” on it. It has just finished flowering, which is supposedly the best time to be doing this task. Armed with heavy-duty hedge trimming shears and a pair of leather gardening gauntlets, I will hopefully have this thing tamed in a future update.

Final count:

• Rosa pimpinellifolia ‘Plena’ – one absolute unit of a shrub