I finally found a picture of it.

Not the best photo, but you can get the idea. It's a rather wild looking thing. I have it in a shrub border underneath a large pin oak, and it fits in quite well. The foliage looks good all year, which is a plus.

I got it from Sequoia, so I'd ask Burling if she has it.

Beautiful photo! I like it.
I'll see about Burlington, never ordered from them before. Seems by appointment to order?

-Ian

Are you looking for R. sericea, or the more common R. sericea f. pteracantha? If the former, the only source I can find is Sheffield's, which offers seed. (And unfortunately I don't have experience growing it from seed, so I can't comment about that.) If the latter, you can find it in stock right now at ForestFarm, Gossler Farms, and Rogue Valley Roses.

I doubt Burling will have it in stock -- you can get a sense of what she offers from her HelpMeFind page -- but I can definitely recommend ordering roses from her.

As someone who has a lot of questions about rose availability, you might enjoy getting the Combined Rose List, which Peter Schneider updates yearly. It's the best guide I know of for tracking down roses, particularly rare roses, in commerce.

To clarify, I'm growing R. sericea f. pteracantha.

Hi Ross! Hope you're doing well, and sorry, yes to clarify I'm looking for R. Sericea Pteracantha.
ForestFarms is where I was originally going to buy it, they have nice reviews and seem friendly.
PlantLust sales it via Gosser Farms for 27 bucks.

R. sericea ptericantha is a fascinating thing, but not easy to grow — at least not here. I had multiple plants of it that all gradualluy dwindled down to nubs and died. It was pretty much finished off by the 2015 Polar Vortex here, which isn't surprising. I recall 25 years ago I did collect seed from it, but I have no record of actually getting seedlings from it.

I also have R. Pteragonis, a hybrid of ptericantha and hugonis which is far easier to grow and in most ways nearly identical to sericea ptericantha, except the flowers are slightly more yellow. It has the same "stained glass" red thorns.

Dang Paul, that's unfortunate to hear..Glad the hybrid is doing better though.
I looked it up on HMF and the hybrid looks quite nice, it has 5 petals though. Very neat.

Was it too cold where you lived for it to survive or maybe something else?

What a beautiful rose, mad gallica!

Here it is one of the easiest roses to grow. Stick in ground and ignore for a few decades. About every other year a cane or two of dead wood is cut out. That's IT.

Does this species sucker?

It hasn't suckered for me.

Okay, thank you. Good to know

@Ian Stewart: Zone 6 Western Kentucky, USA

R. pteracantha clearly didn't like something about this PNW climate, but — at least up to 2015* — it seems unlikely that our temperatures weren't the issue, since we are USDA 8B here. I'm not sure what its problems were. We have very unforgiving volcanic clay here, and a lot of roses just won't grow in that stuff. That alone may have been it's main complaint.

*in 2015 we had 10 days of cold that went well below zero F at night (some nights we recorded minus 15F!) and that killed 95% of all roses I had in pots in the greenhouses. A significant portion of my Ralph Moore collection, and many of my proprietary breeders all died that winter.

I see. Here, our soil is straight up sandy clay. Plants seem to like it though.
I wonder how it would fair here