ROSA INVOLUCRATA 
and Mysore. China also may be included among its habitats if we 
may rely upon the plate in Braam’s Chinese drawings. 1 There is in 
the herbarium of the Botanical Garden at St. Petersburg a specimen 
belonging to the Chamisso collection of which the origin is given as 
“ China.” Bretschneider includes it in his Botanical Discoveries in 
China. 
Rosa involucrata much resembles Rosa bracteata, but may easily 
be distinguished from that species by its narrower leaflets, drawn out 
at the points and thin in texture, by its long, slender branches, light 
brown and densely pubescent, by its laciniated stipules and bracts, and 
by its long, straight prickles pointing upwards, whereas in Rosa bracteata 
they are mostly hooked and it is only on the young flowering shoots 
that they are somewhat straight. The large white flowers and graceful 
growth of this species are seen to best advantage on the Riviera, for, 
although it will generally survive our English winters and has been 
known to flower in the open air at Kew, it cannot be considered as 
sufficiently hardy to take its place in our gardens. It was planted in 
the Calcutta Botanic Gardens in 1797, and imported into England by 
Whitley of Fulham in 1816. It is the only Rose indigenous in the 
plains and lower mountains of India, and is usually found growing in 
marshy ground or by the side of tanks and margins of streams. Rosa 
bracteata , on the contrary, prefers a dry situation. 
Rosa involucrata is thus described by Sir George Watt in an 
unpublished diary of explorations in Manipur during 1882 : 
“ Common along the sandy margins of the rivers which traverse the valley of 
Manipur proper, especially around the city. 
“ Children are sent out to collect its large beautiful white flowers and to bring 
these into town, where they are used as offerings in religious worship or worn in 
the hair of the women. It grows in great isolated masses, being quite covered with 
flowers during two or three months of the winter season. 
“The Indian distribution of this rose is somewhat remarkable. In his Hima- 
layan Journal (vol. ii. pp. 261-2) Sir J. D. Hooker points out its extraordinary 
occurrence in the jungles of Eastern Bengal, intermixed with palms and other 
tropical plants and thus living on alluvial soils. Some years ago I came upon it, 
in great profusion, within the valleys of the Rajmahal hills (thus just outside the 
Tropics), luxuriating under conditions so very different from those of Eastern and 
Northern Bengal that its presence there seemed unaccountable. It is true I also 
collected in the same locality Androsace saxifragaefolia , Drosera Burmanii and 
several other plants which, like the rose, are representatives of the warm temperate 
vegetation, but the dry rocky soil and high temperature of Rajmahal is so different 
from that of the inundated swampy plains of Bengal, as to suggest a power of 
endurance at variance with the somewhat local and restricted occurrence of the 
species. I suspect there may be two species at least commonly placed under the 
present name, the one the swamp-loving, the other the dry-soil plant. In some 
respects the Manipur form is suggestive of a third that comes near to Rosa bracteata 
Wendl., ex Bot. Mag . vol. xxxiv. pi. 1377, the old-fashioned Macartney’s Rose. 
“ The assemblage of wild roses of tropical (or perhaps rather subtropical) India 
1 See above, p. 25, note 2. 
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