In gardens it grows from four to six feet high, in any 
common garden soil, strikes freely from cuttings of the ripe 
wood in Autumn or Spring, and flowers in May. It has not 
fruited in this country as far as we know. 
Sir James Smith, who published it under the name of 
R. ferox, without remembering that Pursh had already given 
it the name it bears, described it thus. * A very fine remark- 
able species, whose branches are thickly covered with tawny, 
setaceous, prominent prickles, about a quarter of an inch 
in length, and armed under each bud with three very strong 
and pungent awl-shaped ones, an inch long, having sometimes 
lesser reflexed prickles at their base. The leaves are not 
unlike our common gooseberries, but more rugose, and 
densely downy at the back. Flower-stalks solitary, simple, 
longer than the leaves. Bracteas scattered. Flowers droop- 
ing, large and handsome. Calyx three-quarters of an inch 
long, funnel-shaped, downy and bristly ; as far as we can 
judge from the dried specimens, it seems of a fine crimson; 
its segments lanceolate, ribbed, erect, full twice as long as 
the tube. Petals half the length of these segments, erect, 
pale, obtuse. Stamens the length of the calyx. Anthers 
large, oblong-heart-shaped, pointed. Germen covered with 
prominent, glandular bristles, which harden, as the fruit 
advances, into stiff, sharp spines, so that whatever its flavour 
may be, it seems perfectly inaccessible, in the common way 
of eating gooseberries.” 
