Such a multi-talented rose:
—Delicate four-petal white flowers with a bouncy, darker-hued levitating poof of pistols in the center.  (I didn't say big four-petal white flowers, though.  An inch and a half, tops.)
—Inch-and-a-half leaves with minute leaflets so small they look ferny.
—Burgundy-pink action at the base of the leaves......which is the protective scale that had covered the young leaf through the Winter. By happy accident, it's chatting nicely with the burgundy of the cut-leaf Japanese maple in the background.
All tidy, tiny, and tame. Those aren't cursewords for me, but still, I have my limits. And indeed, the real reason I grow this rose is because it has such a counter-intuitively ferocious and colorful Winter show.
Thanks to rainyside.com, take a look at this:
Those unique, scarlet, translucent thorns are on eager new canes, just sprouted that Spring, that have yet to leaf out. They'll catch the low Winter sunlight with wierd talent.
When they leaf out the next Spring, their thorns will have dulled completely, as on the older cane at the center.
To grow a rose for the flowers is normal. To nod to appealing leaves is the next deeper level of sophistication. To grow a rose for the thorns that look particularly blood-thirsty in Winter when the bush is leafless and the wind is howling? Morticia Addams would be proud.
My red-spined rose is just getting it's head together, and is just barely big enough and old enough to bloom, yes. Maybe this season it will grow some new canes energetically enough that they'll sport the red spines this coming Winter. Those new canes can be encouraged by pruning the entire bush hard right after flowering. This maximizes the Winter show, but because it also removes the older canes, which have the flowers, there would be no Spring bloom to follow. Morticia would be proud of that too. My fantasy is to grow this rose as a standard, by cutting all the branches that grow out of a single point at the top of one main trunk back to that same point—and yes, right after flowering. No flowers, but what a Winter show. Morticia, I'm shoulder-to-shoulder with you: Thorns trump flowers. Bloodthirsty is better than pretty. Ferocious is more fabulous than tame.