Sambar Browse Plants – Briar Rose

This introduced plant goes by a number of names in Australia besides briar rose, including wild rose and sweet rose. It is a native of Europe and western Asia and has been present in Australia since early European settlement, introduced as a garden and hedge plant and as a source of food.

The briar rose now occurs from southern South Australia, through Victoria and eastern New South Wales into south-eastern Queensland as well as in eastern Tasmania. It is a plant primarily of hilly and difficult-to-manage marginal grazing country but will also be found invading the fringes of forested country – freehold lands in the Macalister, Dargo, Tambo and Mitta River valleys spring to mind as ‘classic’ areas for briar rose but it is obviously going to be in lots of other valleys besides these. Because of its association with marginal farmland, briar rose usually occurs together with patches of blackberry, often as a tangled and impenetrable (to humans at least) mess and often harbouring foxes and rabbits too, and with low sambar trails through it.

Briar rose typically grows to about two metres tall as a multi-stemmed and extremely prickly shrub – if anything is more difficult to push through that blackberries, this might be it! Its prickles are large, very bitey and are extremely hard to disentangle from. The leaves of the briar rose are similar to those of garden roses although generally quite a bit smaller, a feature that makes this plant relatively easy to identify. Leaves turn yellow and are lost over the winter months, reducing shrubs to bare stems.

Shrubs produce pink flowers two to four centimetres in diameter in the spring and summer. Unlike the flowers of most modern garden roses that sport multiple rows of petals, the briar rose’s flowers only have a single row. Flowers are replaced by green fruits (rose hips) later in the summer which are oval in shape and about two centimetres long. The fleshy hips change to orange and then red as the seeds that they contain mature. Hips may persist on plants well into the winter months, making the bare plants with their large and brightly coloured fruits very conspicuous to the human eye.

Sambar will browse on the leaves of briar rose and are also keen on the hips which can often be found in the rumen of animals dwelling in farm-fringe country. Whether sambar are eating the leaves or hips of briar roses may be difficult to determine as evidence of this may be hard to see - tracks in the grass near shrubs may be related to grazing or browsing on other plants such as blackberries. One sure way to determine whether deer are feeding on roses is to shoot an animal and examine the rumen (paunch) content for the very characteristic foliage or rose hips depending on the season.

Hips are also eaten by other animals, particularly foxes, emus, rosellas and blackbirds and all probably play a part in spreading this weed species around. As suggested above, briar roses were introduced to Australia partly because of the perceived usefulness of the hips as a base for making such things as drinks, jams and jellies. While they may have been viewed favourably for such uses in the early 19 th century they are now regarded as a serious weed, would be shunned by gardeners and it is probably only ‘back to nature’ types who would bother to collect and use the hips these days in Australia.