General: Medium to tall shrub, 1 to 3 m tall, usually thicket-forming; stems erect, armed with scattered, flattened, unequal, curved or hooked spines, sometimes also with short straight prickles; mature stems olive-green.
Leaves: Alternate, deciduous, odd-pinnately compound, the axis fine-prickly and densely glandular; leaflets 5 or 7, broadly elliptic to nearly circular, 1-2.5 cm long, hairy and stalked-glandular beneath, coarsely double-saw-toothed, the teeth gland-tipped; leaves aromatic, especially in warm weather.
Flowers: Inflorescence of 1 to 3 or more stalked flowers at the end of a lateral branchlet, the stalks glandular-hairy; corollas pink, saucer-shaped, 3-5 cm across, the petals 5, 10-20 mm long; calyces 5-lobed, the lobes 10-20 mm long, stalked-glandular, some of them with narrow, toothed lateral segments, spreading to reflexed after flowering, falling off when the fruit is mature; ovaries superior but enclosed in the urn-shaped floral tube (hypanthium); stamens numerous.
Fruits: Achenes, enclosed by the fleshy hypanthium, which ripens into a scarlet, globe- to egg-shaped hip 1-1.5 cm long.
If more than one illustration is
available for a species (e.g., separate illustrations were provided for two
subspecies) then links to the separate images will be provided below.
Note that individual subspecies or varietal illustrations are not always available.
