I am a rose enthusiast and I’ve been reaching out to other enthusiasts. I put together this little history of one of the world’s first rose gardens. I hope you enjoy!
Josephine’s Garden: The Empress who invented Rose Collecting
ROSE HISTORY · NO. 1
Joséphine’s Garden: The Empress Who Invented Rose Collecting
Before 1799, roses were garden plants, loved, certainly, but loved the way people loved lilacs or peonies. After Joséphine, they were an obsession, a fashion, an industry, and eventually a science. The change can be traced to one woman’s checkbook and willpower, and to a château a few miles west of Paris.
Marie-Josèphe-Rose Tascher de La Pagerie, Napoleon called her Joséphine, but her family had called her Rose, a detail almost too perfect to be true, bought the Château de Malmaison while her husband was campaigning in Egypt. He was reportedly furious about the price. She was undeterred, then and always. Her plan for the grounds was not modest: she intended to grow every rose known to exist.
Money was no obstacle, and neither, remarkably, was war. Legend holds that ships carrying plants bound for Malmaison were granted safe passage through the British naval blockade, and that her plant agents shopped freely in enemy London’s nurseries while the two empires fought. Her head gardeners scoured Europe and beyond; diplomats and naval officers learned that a rare rose was better currency at court than jewels. By her death in 1814 she had assembled roughly 250 varieties, very likely the most complete rose collection ever attempted to that point in history.
What made Malmaison matter, though, wasn’t the collecting; it was what the collection caused. For the first time anywhere, hundreds of rose varieties grew side by side where breeders could compare them, cross them, and study them systematically. Her gardeners —chief among them the botanist-nurserymen she patronized and effectively bankrolled —began raising seedlings deliberately rather than trusting the bees. The French nursery trade that grew up around her patronage went on to dominate world rose breeding for a full century: the great families of nineteenth-century French roses, the Bourbons and Hybrid Perpetuals and Teas that fill the old catalogs, trace straight back to the market Malmaison created.
She also gave roses their public relations department. She commissioned Pierre-Joseph Redouté, the finest botanical painter alive, to document her collection, and his portraits became the most famous flower images ever printed, still reproduced two centuries later. Collecting made the roses valuable; Redouté made them immortal.
There’s a poignant coda. Joséphine died in May 1814, of a chill caught, the story goes, walking her gardens with the Tsar of Russia in a fashionably thin dress, and Malmaison itself declined quickly. The collection dispersed; many varieties survived only because they had already been shared. The empire of roses outlived the empire.
Nearly every rose in our 29,000-variety catalog descends, in commerce or in spirit, from the enthusiasm one empress manufactured at Malmaison. Not a bad legacy for a garden that lasted barely fifteen years, and for a woman who was, after all, only returning to her first name.
I hope you enjoyed the article! My goal is to support the thousands of rose nurseries across the country, to promote information about roses, and to bring the community of rose lovers a little closer! Thank you ARS for all you do!
-Nick Fritz