Eglantine Rose

Note Profile

Botanical

About

Wild hedgerow rose read through its apple-scented leaves. Tart and green first, lightly floral second.

Scent Profile

Green dominates and both sources say so independently: the apple-green quality is the signature, and the foliage has a strong apple-like fragrance. The green is specifically green apple peel, so a fruity reading sits directly on top of it, though the source is careful that it smells more like unripe fruit than flower. Sour follows from the same description, tart and crisp rather than sweet or heady. Floral is real but secondary, a light floral undertone that the source calls a simple, light rose underneath and less perfumy than cultivated roses. A faint warm_spice sits below all of it, described only as a whisper of clove from the hips.

ScentWheel

Breadthbroad

EnvelopeHeart · ~5h lasting

Family Green & Aromatic, Fruity, Floral

Read off the wheel, not a label applied to the note.

Origin

Eglantine is Rosa rubiginosa, the sweet briar of European hedgerows, now also grown in Chile and South Africa. The scent the name refers to is not in the flower. It is in the glandular hairs on the foliage, which give the plant its English name: sweet for the apple smell of the leaves, briar for the thorns. Piesse's Art of Perfumery recorded in 1857 that the plant does not repay the labour of collecting its odour and that what the trade sold as eglantine was a compound built on rose pomatum. No modern supplier sell-sheet for a Rosa rubiginosa extract was found, so the note as used today is best treated as a reconstruction.

Usage in Perfumery

Used to put a wild, unripe edge on a rose. It reads as hedgerow rather than as bouquet, so it works where a cultivated rose absolute would be too rich or too sweet. The apple-green top makes it a natural bridge between fruit and floral material, and the faint clove from the hips gives it a small spiced tail. Suited to green florals, chypres and any composition that wants a rose that has not been to market.