Often, when reading a description of a rose, you may run across terminology about the structure of the leaf, stem, flower, etc., which is important in identifying the rose, but which is unfamiliar to you. I thought it might be useful to write about the subject, perhaps in a series of articles. We'll start with leaf structure.
Roses have compound leaves, which means there is more than one leaf blade per leaf.
Each blade is referred to as a leaflet . The leaf illustrated here has five leaflets, the end one of which is referred to as the terminal leaflet. Most roses have several leaflets, and the number may be characteristic of a particular rose. Five is probably the most common number, but many roses have 7 or even more. The whole leaf is attached to the main stem of the bush with a short stem-like piece known as the petiole .