A robust shrub 6 to 10 ft high, its prickles stout, usually straight, with a broad flattened base, paired at the nodes, sometimes 1⁄2 in. long on the young barren stems, often absent from the flowering branchlets. Leaves 3 to 5 in. long; rachis glandular. Leaflets five to nine, elliptic or ovate, 3⁄4 to 2 in. long, typically edged with compound glandular teeth (but see var. hispida), glandular and sometimes downy beneath. Flowers solitary or in twos or threes, bright red, 2 to 21⁄2 in. across. Receptacles and pedicels smooth or glandular-bristly. Sepals 1 to 11⁄2 in. long, narrow, with an expanded leaf-like apex, smooth or glandular-bristly and more or less downy. Fruits globose or orange-shaped, red, 1⁄2 to 5⁄8 in. wide, crowned with the long, erect sepals.
Native of western N. America; described in 1851 from a specimen collected on Nutka Sound in 1791 by Haenke, botanist on the Malaspina expedition; specimens collected later by Menzies, Douglas and others were identified as R. fraxinifolia, which, in Lindley’s sense, is R. blanda. There appears to be no record of its cultivation in Britain before 1884. It is a handsome wild rose, perhaps the handsomest of W. American species, and flowers and fruits well in this country.
var. hispida Fern. R. spaldingii Crép.; R. macdougalii Holzinger – Leaflets simply toothed and eglandular. Prickles weaker, not much enlarged or flattened at the base. Of more easterly distribution than the typical state and in places intergrading with it (Cronquist in Hitchcock et al., Vasc. Pl. Pacif. Northwest, Part 3 (1961), p. 170). Introduced to Kew before 1905.
‘Cantab’ (p. 175) is a hybrid of R. nutkana.