Green apple peel and wild rose. The eglantine smells more like unripe fruit than flower: tart, crisp, with a light floral undertone and a whisper of clove from the hips.
Green apple peel from the scented leaves dominates, with a simple, light rose underneath. Tart and crisp rather than sweet or heady. A faint clove-spice from the hips. Less perfumy than cultivated roses, more hedgerow-wild. The apple-green quality is the signature: it smells like walking through a wet eglantine hedge.
Evolution over time
Immediately
Immediately
Green apple peel, crisp tart freshness
After a few hours
After a few hours
Light wild rose, faint clove from hips
After a few days
After a few days
Soft green-rosy trace
Terroir & Origins
Indicative 2025 wholesale prices.
The Full Story
Eglantine rose (Rosa rubiginosa, syn. R. eglanteria) is a wild rose species native to Europe, distinguished by glands on the undersides of its leaves that release a strong green apple scent when brushed or moistened by rain. This apple-scented foliage makes it unique among roses.
The flowers are small, single, and pale pink with a light, simple rose fragrance. But the plant's defining olfactory contribution comes from the leaves: a crisp, green apple peel scent from trans-2-hexenal and related compounds. The hips contribute a faint spicy-clove note from eugenol.
In perfumery, eglantine rose provides a natural green-rosy note with a particular apple quality. It functions in the heart of green-floral, wild garden, and English countryside compositions. The apple-leaf quality distinguishes it from all other rose notes, making it specifically pastoral and undomesticated.
This note in Première Peau. Nuit Elastique · Rose Monotone. Sample all seven extraits in the Discovery Set.
Shakespeare mentions eglantine repeatedly, most famously in A Midsummer Night's Dream: Titania's bower is 'quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine, with sweet musk-roses and with eglantine.' The Elizabethans valued the plant for its apple-scented foliage rather than its modest flowers.
Extraction & Chemistry
Extraction method: The plant is rarely extracted for perfumery. Wild rose absolutes from related species exist but do not capture the particular apple-leaf character. The eglantine effect in compositions is typically built by combining rose materials with green apple-peel molecules.
Eglantine rose is a natural heart modifier in green-floral, pastoral, and English countryside compositions. Its apple-scented foliage provides a unique green-fruity rose quality absent from cultivated rose varieties. The green apple quality comes from trans-2-hexenal. Useful in compositions seeking wild-rose authenticity rather than cultivated-rose luxury.
