Several years ago I was speaking at the annual meeting of the Texas Rose Rustlers (those who visit old home sites and cemeteries in search of roses), and I used the word ‘thorns’ when describing a rose I had found. In the front row sat an elderly lady who started shaking her head. I wasn’t sure why. I continued, saying that the rose was finally identified as ‘President Herbert Hoover’, a Hybrid Tea from 1930, because of its big thorns.

Again the head shaking started. I could hear low laughter from the audience. So I asked her aloud, “Am I saying something that upsets you?”

“Yes. Roses don’t have thorns.” General laughter.

“What do they have, then?”

“They have prickles.”

My face reddened, but I continued. Later I asked her how she knew this. “It is a scientific fact.” Members of the audience said she did this at every talk, waiting to trap the unwary speaker. When I returned to California, I headed for my botanical dictionary. Sure enough, she was right. So I have always used prickles in my writing and speaking.

A few weeks ago I saw ‘The Passion of the Christ’, the film by Mel Gibson. In the scene when he is crowning Christ with a wreath, the Roman soldier said it was one with rose thorns. Good grief. I could see from 50 yards away that it was not a rose. Where did the script writer (probably Gibson himself) get his information? No doubt from a dictionary or gardening book.

Sometimes the dictionary is of little help. Here is the entry for prickle in the Concise Oxford Dictionary: ‘Small thorn; (Bot.) thorn-like process developed from, and capable of being peeled off with, epidermis of plant’. Most people will read the first entry and believe that prickles are the same as thorns. The second entry is accurate.The entry under thorn gives no botanical definition, only ‘stiff sharp-pointed process on plant’. This offers no distinction much less a clear picture.

My latest book (2001) Microsoft Encarta College Dictionary is absolutely hopeless at making things clear. After six more dictionaries, I gave up. I did not consult my botanical dictionaries (in English) because I knew I should find the correct explanation there.

My most heavily used gardening book is Peter Beales’ Classic Roses, where he consistenly uses thorns. In the giant Botanica’s Roses, to which I was a contributor, the explanation is quite maddening: “Technically, roses do not have thorns, but prickles, which are outgrowths of the bark.” And thorns are used throughout the book. I realized that my editor, Gordon Cheers, had changed all my entries! Had I known this at the time, I should have complained vigorously.

My French rose friend, Odile Masquelier, tells me the same thing happens in France, where most people use epines instead of aiguillons. My Belgian friend, Ingrid Verdegem, says that Belgians do the same thing, ignoring stekel for doorn. I haven’t checked Germany, but I would bet the situation is the same there.

The New Columbia Encyclopedia gave me more of what I was looking for. ‘Botanically, thorns are distinguised as modified stems (as in the honey locust and hawthorn) from spines, which are modified leaves, and from prickles, which are epidermal outgrowths of the bark (as in the rose and blackberry)’.

I can forgive Shakespeare, Milton, even Christina Rossetti, who all used thorns with roses, even though they frequently got their botany right.

The best way to demonstrate the difference is to try to remove the prickle or the thorn with your thumb while holding the cane or stem of the plant. You can remove it easily from most roses (the prickle, that is), while it is impossible to push off the thorn on a lemon tree branch, for instance.

There are roses that have awesome prickles that are not easily removed by one’s thumb. But with enough force they can be. The ones I never mess with include R.sericea pteracantha (the Wingthorn Rose), that justifies its outrageous red, translucent prickles with their beauty. Also ‘Sir Cedric Morris’, a lovely white-flowered climber, which caught me in its deathly grasp - and a half hour later, after yelling for neighbors, I was freed.

‘Mermaid’ is avoided by many gardeners, for its reputation puts it at the top of the list of those with wicked intent. I gave a rooted cutting of this magnificent single yellow climber to my neighbor. The rose grew quickly, covering a tall garage. When he tried to prune it, he was bloodied in the attempt. So he cut it at the ground level - but then when he tried to haul it away, it attacked him again. He thought the rose was dead - three years later it has resurrected.

Gerd Krussmann, in his book The Complete Book of Roses, states, ‘The prickles can be uniform or of different form, straight or more or less curved, strongly hooked, needle-shaped throughout, triangular or dilated at the base, or even wing shaped’. You must have seen those drawings in old rose books of line drawings, especially pictures of bristles and prickles together and of different size on the same cane.

The color of prickles is unusual when they are yellow, nearly white, or bright red (as I mentioned above with R. sericea pteracantha). Nearly all are either reddish or brown. I’ve seen different prickle colors for this rose - on plants growing in the garden of Maurice Foster in Kent, where he planted the seeds he gathered in China. He said they can be blood red and then pinkish rose.

Prickle sizes vary widely from 1.5 up to 10 mm. However, some may reach even 30-40 mm. in the rose mentioned above. The ones that are most troublesome for the gardener are hooked, making it difficult to disengage one’s clothing, especially sweaters. There are garden tools which help to remove prickles, but you must first cut the rose to use them. I wear welder’s thick gloves, having been a youthful welder in a shipyard during WWII. They usually work well, but even these are sometimes not thick enough to protect me.

There are people who become allergic to roses because they have been “bitten” so many times. A landscape designer recently asked me for names of roses without armour - he was working on a garden for a lady who is blind. I had to think a bit, but gave him the following list, which proved successful.

Rosa foliolosa produces bright cerise single flowers in mid-summer in my garden, followed by beautiful small, round hips in the autumn. R. banksia lutescens, the single yellow member of the Banksia family, which is blooming at the moment here, produces long, thin canes covered with blooms. There are a few tiny prickles. ‘Zephirine Drouhin’, an old Bourbon pillar rose, produces cerise, semi-double fragrant blooms; ‘Kathleen Harrop’, a pink seedling, also is relatively free of prickles. My R. pendulina has lovely pink single flowers with strong yellow stamens, and it has attractive fall foliage.

Caulis aculeis multis inaequalibus rectis vel curvatis I found in my botanical Latin book: ‘stem with prickles many unequal straight or curved’. If this source had confused prickles with thorns, I should have given up the battle.

When I was young I fell in love with the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) and read his letters as well. Frequently he used roses as symbols of beauty and love. One day as he was picking roses in a friend’s garden in Switzerland, he tore his skin on a prickle. The wound did not heal, became infected, and he died at the young age of 51. He wrote the epitaph that appears on his tomb: