As rosehips begin to blush, Dubliners dig out old recipes

Along the Grand Canal on Tuesday morning, the rosehips in the hedge separating the canalside path from the Luas tracks ran from lime green to raspberry red.

People walked by along the tarmacadam path, past a heron crouching at the edge of the canal, shoulders hunched, eyes on the water. Cyclists weaved past them.

Commuters packed into a red-line tram headed into town read their phones, or looked out the window as it rattled past.

There was no one picking the fruit from among the green leaves, thorny stalks, and crepe-paper pink blooms of the rose bushes.

But sometimes Polly Rowley-Sams does as she walks to work at Richmond Barracks in Inchicore, she said by phone on Thursday.

“The ones on the canal, the rosehips, they’re really nice, they’re really sweet – in-the-middle sweet, like, a well-rounded sweet,” said Rowley-Sams, eco-gardener-in-residence at the old stone barracks not far from the canal.

“I walk along and eat them like little apples,” she says.

There’s about 1cm of fruit around the seed, which has tiny hairs in it that can be used to make “itchy powder”, Rowley-Sams said. “You don’t eat the middle because of the itchy powder.”

It’s rosehip season. And, along this stretch of canal between Blackhorse and Suir Road, and in parks across the city, people are quietly gathering them to dry and turn into tea, use to flavour gin, or boil down into syrup or – with other fruit – into “hedge ketchup”.

“Rosehip season is always a nice time, it grows in abundance in the local area,” says  Connor Howlett, gardener-in-residence and brand ambassador at Stillgarden Distillery in Inchicore.

Hedge ketchup

Walking along the path next the canal between the Blackhorse and Drimnagh Luas stops about 11am on 10 July, Tony Williams says he didn’t choose roses for the hedge so that people could forage the rosehips.

Williams, a landscape architect, did the landscape design for Transport Infrastructure Ireland (TII) when it built the Luas line, he says.

The rose bushes look nice and they’re thorny and dense, so they’re a good barrier, Williams says. “And you can’t hide in it and jump out at night.”

TII is in charge of maintaining the hedge, Williams says, including keeping it cut to a certain height to ensure that Luas drives have full visibility. There are high bits and low bits of the hedge, “to create undulation”, Williams says.

“We don’t really want foraging – because the bushes are close to the tracks,” he says. “But if they’re going to be foraging, do it safely.”

Howlett, of Stillgarden, said by phone on Friday that he gathers rosehips from further up along the canal, towards Ballyfermot and Clondalkin, after the Luas has split from it, and there’s just a cyclepath next to the canal.

Stillgarden also has a couple of spots near the distillery in the Goldenbridge Industrial Estate where it grows rosehips, which it uses as a base for its gins, Howlett says. “It adds a citrusy fruitiness,” he says.

To prepare them, he’d cut them in half, scrape out the seeds, and rinse them to get any leftover hairs out. “When I was a kid, we’d put those down people’s backs to make them itch,” he says.

Rowley-Sams, the gardener at Richmond Barracks, says she’ll gather rosehips from the hedge along the canal, or elsewhere, “as long as they’re higher than a dog can wee”.

She’ll add in other things she can gather, to make hedgerow ketchup, she says.

She’ll prepare the rosehips to get the hairs out, add blackberries, and or some apples maybe, plus vinegar, spices and sugar. “All cooked into a kind of runny jam,” she says.

Rowley-Sams does biodiversity walking tours through Richmond Barracks, the next one scheduled for 11am on 14 August.

Howlett does foraging walks, like one he recently did with some bartenders, through Stephen’s Green, Merrion Square and Trinity College Dublin. “Sometimes they’ll use ingredients I point out in their cocktails,” he says.

“I think people crave a connection with nature, but it’s all around us, we just need to be more conscious of it,” Howlett says.

A connection to nature

Raising three kids in the city, Fiona Fitzsimons wanted to give them a connection to nature, she said by phone on Friday.

“So we did things like growing our own veg in the garden, or taking them to the park to see geese migrating, and trees changing with the seasons,” Fitzsimons said.

She started reading Richard Mabey’s book Food for Free, a guide to the edible wild plants of Britain, originally published in 1972.

Growing up, her grandmother had given her rosehip syrup. It’s high in vitamin C, and people used to take it as a “tonic” then, she says.

The syrup could be bought in shops, but her grandmother and others used to gather rosehips and make their own. “This was something ordinarily done in the countryside.”

“I remember even as a child thinking my granny’s tasted better than the one you got in the shop,” she said.

Reading Food for Free, Fitzsimons found a recipe for rosehip syrup. So she and her partner took their young lads – the oldest was five or six, she says – to Phoenix Park and Waterstown Park, to forage for rosehips and make syrup.

They’re easy for kids to identify, and easy to gather, Fitzsimons says. “And I always told the kids to leave a certain amount on the bushes for the birds.”

“That was part of why we were there, taking them out and getting them to think about what is nature and what does it require of us – mostly being left alone, I guess,” she says.

For the syrup, they started off by following the recipe in the book, but over time Fitzsimons changed it, she says, cutting back on the amount of sugar.

“I was trying to recreate what my granny used to make – like the juices in the bottom of an apple tart, it’s sweet and it’s tart and it’s one of the best things ever,” she says. “We gave it to the kids as a treat, we’d pour it over ice cream, or over an apple tart.”

One day she was working away in the kitchen, and her two older boys and a friend came in from playing outside and asked if they could have some syrup, so she told them sure, go on ahead.

“But they were like, this isn’t syrup!” Fitzsimons recalls. She tasted it and, sure enough, she’d cut back on the sugar too far and it had fermented.

“We put it aside and had rosehip champagne for Christmas that year,” Fitzsimons said. “It was delicious, light.”

Walking along the canal next to the Luas tracks that early July morning, trams roaring by now and then, Williams says he doesn’t forage rosehips himself.

Would he like to try it, though, maybe dry them to make tea? “I’m a Barry’s Tea man myself,” Williams says, laughing.