by Emma Patsey
Roses, Rosa multiflora—or affectionately, dog roses, are my personal patron saint of the Hudson Valley. Being raised in this valley left me too blinded by familiarity to fully realize its eccentric magic and just how much of me reflected in the landscape that watched me grow.
Early in my herbal studies, I found myself working in Northern California with a community of farmers that foraged for wild foods and medicine. I grew to deeply appreciate the miles of St. John’s Wort on crisp, dried grassy hills, the magic of hanging usnea on craggy oaks and the deep nutritive essence of seaweeds from the Mendocino shore. When I returned home to the Hudson Valley, its lush abundance of bushing and vining temperate growth made me feel like a stranger in its clay soil. On my homecoming, I realized I could not greet the plants that welcomed me back to a place I considered my home.
When I thought of a rose, I thought of enormous hips of ground roses (R. spithamea) I gushed over on the shrubby dunes of Mendocino between thick fennel and vetch. Something too precious to share presence with a place like upstate New York. I remember sitting on the lawn of my childhood house pouring over the beautifully pictured double page spread of roses varieties in my mother’s herbal: “The New Age Herbalist” by Richard Mabey. In its pages, I spotted the little clusters of soft pink and white dog roses. Raising my eyes from the page, for the first time, I saw the way the little briars covered the Hudson Valley landscape in its thorny grasp, lining each border and tree line. It’s gentle sent meandering in the early June breeze. I struggled to dote over the Hudson Valley in the same way I romanized the places I considered “other.” In that single moment, rose brought me into the sober realization that this place was deserving of my attention more than maybe any other.
After a recent loss of the physical and emotional space of the person I considered home—I revisited my relationship with this five petal friend of Venus to address the constricting, yet sore tightness of my chest I carried heavily as a moving reminder of my grief. The unwilling weight of not letting go felt in the rising and falling lump in my throat that muted the strength and integrity of my voice that moved so weakly from lungs.
Meditating on the rose, we can clearly see its healthy boundaries: a soft but strong heart that is open yet protected. Energetically, roses are often used to open the heart in instances of vulnerability, grief, emotional shock, and depression. Grief viscerally shifts our view of how we fit into the world—which is physiologically perceived as a threat—initiating a persistent sympathetic stress response that causes increased blood pressure and inflammation to the heart space, presenting as a broken heart. Tough, present, and hard stemmed, rose helps us again find the boundaries that allow us to modulate while providing a gentle anti-inflammatory action to soothe the physical presentations of heartbreak.
Grief can leave us feeling restless, irritated, sleepless, and generally agitated. As a gentle, cooling nervine, rose can support our overly taxed nervous system and allow for the refrigerant, calming actions to soothe the inflamed, rising anger, frustration and confusion we may feel while grieving. Its high volatile oil content creates its soft scent that allows our limbic system a gentle reminder of what an exuberant heart feels like when full by releasing endorphins that remind us that this place still lives within us.
Often, when in a state of grief, we can also feel surprisingly sore due to the rogue inflammatory response of a continual sympathetic state. I experienced this in debilitating upper shoulder pain and aches and awful full body fatigue. As anti-inflammatory, rose brings warm wash of sensation to the heart space as blood pressure lowers to loosen the ties of tension allowing you to again breathe fully, bringing relief to overall soreness via reactionary release, as stress and tension is so often compounded.
Tension also emerges in our digestion, as our stomach knots in stiff emptiness as if to refuse to fill it, and unwillingly churns if we reach for tastes of comfort. I could and can hardly eat anything without it feeling like a brick in my stomach.
In our sympathetic state, blood flow is reserved for only the most essential organs, and our digestion system is considered second to others. Rose’s bitter-sweet, pungent taste lends itself to some gentle calmative actions that support us as we attempt to make food feel nourishing again.
In my grief, engaging in medicinal preparations became a task rather than a privilege. I’m grateful the universe provided me with my sweet friend Melina, who formulated a beautiful rose-forward medicine she calls “Heart Tender,” a tincture that includes rose and borage glycerinates combined with tincture of linden and hawthorn. I may have emptied about two tincture bottles in one month alone…this tincture was and still is my lifeline. It lived and still lives in any bag I would ever bring anywhere. I get nervous when I’m on my last bottle. The immediacy of the relief it brings to feelings of tightness, weepiness, shakiness is nothing less than divine agency.
In between dropper after dropper of “Heart Tender” I found myself reaching for the second easiest option: rose petal tea. Either alone or thrown into my regular nutritive blends of raspberry, nettle, and clover. And in an effort to confront my grief, I found myself forgoing the typical glass of wine at the end of the day for my homemade kefir. I lent my grains to a sweet tea of rose petals to make the most effervescent, deeply romantic beverage to reserve that special moment of reprieve we all so deeply need.
When I finally moved away from the person and place I called home for nearly a decade of my life, I found multiflora vines thriving in the place I find my head resting, trailing me in its deep medicine. If not that person I said goodbye to, if not that house I once called home—the Hudson Valley has always held me so tenderly under its humid, deciduous canopy of abundant sunsets, tucked in the deep bow of twin mountains while rocking me gently in estuary tides. I am as tenacious and well boundaries as any kindred multi-flora rose that shares the only home that has held me with continuous and unconditional care—even when I was unknowing of it. It scrapes my arms and shins with a well-meaning sting when I move too erratically at its thorny border, reminding me to hold integrity in my step. Perfumes me with gentle grace. Venus herself, a friend of mine. Who knew?
I will be okay.
Citations:
Boskabady MH, Shafei MN, Saberi Z, Amini S.(2011) Pharmacological effects of Rosa damascena. Iran J Basic Med Science.4(4):295-307.
Calvarti, D., Clarke, J., Dimiti, D. et. al. Ed. June, Mara. (2022) “Plant Magic for Grief Support” Motherwort & Rose. Website.
Hopf D, Eckstein M, Aguilar-Raab C, Warth M, Ditzen B.(2020) Neuroendocrine mechanisms of grief and bereavement: A systematic review and implications for future interventions. Neuroendocrinol;32(8)
M. Khazaei, M.R. Khazaei, M. Pathouhi. (2022) An Overview of the Therapeutic potentials of Rosa canina: A Traditionally Valuable Herb. World Cancer Research Journal; 7 (1580)
Pivarlark, M. (2019) “How to Use Rose for Grief Support” The Herbal Academy. Website
Photo credit: Famartin; CC BY-SA 4.0; 2020-05-20 08 05 42 Multiflora Rose flowers along a walking path within Horsepen Run Stream Valley Park in Oak Hill, Fairfax County, Virginia.
A third-year student at ArborVitae, Emma is a clinical herbalist, medicinal gardener, and occasional writer, and lifelong resident of the beautiful Hudson Valley, New York. Her work is largely a love letter to the cycles and patterns of this life that so intimately tie us together. Find her on Substack https://substack.com/@emmativoli.