Erect shrub. Prickles curved or almost absent. Leaves evergreen, leaflets 3-5(-7), deep green and ± shining above, paler beneath, normally glabrous. Stipules very narrow, with lanceolate, erect or slightly divergent auricles. Flowers solitary or several in short panicles, usually double, white to red on long smooth or glandular-stalked pedicels, sepals entire, with long filiform apex, ascending or patent after flowering, deciduous. Styles long, free, (?)glabrous, distinctly protruding through the narrow orifice. Fruit ovoid to pyriform, smooth.

Fl.Per.: August

Type: China, 1733, Gronovius s. n. (BM – Herb. Grono) (Ghora & G. Panigrahi l. c.: 271).

A-7 Chitral NWFP. Hone village, near Degru College, M. Qutabuddin 924 (RAW), B-6 Dist. Chitral: Court Area, Chitral city, M. Qutabuddin 646 (RAW), C-7 Murree Hills, on way to Ayubia, M. Qaiser & S. Abedin 5614 (KUH), D-8 Lahore. Lawrance Garden (=R. chinensis ‘Viridis’ – a cultivar with green flowers!), G-4 Karachi. Intelligence School, R. Islam s.n. (KUH), Karachi, Botany Department, University, A. Husain s.n. (KUH).

Distributon: W. China, Eastern Himalaya, Nepal, introduced and cultivated in India and Pakistan.

Innumerable garden noble roses being the artificial hybrids of Rosa chinensis with representatives of different sections are widely cultivated in gardens, squares and greenhouses. The ‘pure’ Rosa chinensis is rarely grown.

The authorship of Rosa sinica is sometimes attributed to J. A. Murray, the editor of 13th edition of Systema Vegetabilium. In fact Linnaeus was the author of all novelties in this work: ‘Edicio decimal tertia accesionibus et emendationibus novissimis manu perillustris auctoris [i.e. Linnaeus] scriptis odornata a Joanne Andrea Murray….’. (Stafleu & R. S. Cowan, Taxonomic Literature 3. 670. 1981).