If you’re a rose maniac like me, you may know that June is the month of roses, and that Empress Josephine of France is the Godmother of the modern rose. Prior to her gardens at Chateau de Malmaison, few of the world’s rose lovers had the power, passion and connections to collect, propagate and promote roses the way she did.
The Caribbean born Josephine, whose name was originally Rose, married Napoleon Bonaparte in 1796. During his conquests in Egypt, Josephine bought the Chateau. The estate was essentially a 300 acre working farm outside of Paris. While she wasn’t a gardener herself, she was a voracious reader and lover of botany and horticulture books of her time. Using her wisdom and political connections, she hired Thomas Blaikie to layout the gardens. She also hired the man who would become France’s first rose horticulturalist, Andre Du Pont. But there was a staff of other great gardeners and landscapers who also helped realize her vision for the estate that became known as one of the most beautiful gardens in Europe.
While Josephine originally loved all flowers, it wasn’t until 1804 that she fell in love with roses. The flower became quite an obsession for her. Du Pont helped gather the roses she wanted by using his connections to engage in a worldwide search. But it was Josephine who was especially successful at acquiring botanical possessions through the military conquests of her husband. She asked him and his men to send rose cuttings and seedlings from wherever they went in the world. Du Pont would then use an artificial, controlled pollination, method to propagate these roses. The process was innovative for its time because roses were often the result of hybrids and mutations in natural settings and gardens. Through Josephine's direction and Du Pont's techniques, they collected and hybridized the 250 or so roses, many of which we now have today.
Josephine was also an important figure in the world of botanical art. She requested the cataloguing of her garden be done through illustrations, which led her to the botanist and illustrator, Pierre-Joseph Redouté. With her support, Redouté continued detailing the flowers of his day as well as rare specimens from around the world. When he turned his focus on Malmaison, she enabled him to produce some of the best known and celebrated watercolor botanical art in the world. The series is known as Jardin de la Malmaison and Les Roses.
Perhaps Josephine's greatest legacy is the passion and inspiration she fueled among gardeners for generations to come. As a fashionable and revered style setter of her day, she focused the world's attention on roses in a whole new way. The gardeners she funded went on to seed, if you will, a more organized process that spread roses to other gardens throughout Europe. English gardeners of the 19th Century began to compete with each other’s rose collections. As a worldly example of her influence, one of the earliest specimens of Souvenir De Malmaison, a rare and wonderful rose developed and marketed 30 years after her death, was ceremoniously planted in the Russian Imperial Gardens in 1884.
The next time you take a walk in the garden, and stop to smell a rose, remember Josephine. The Godmother of roses continues to live in many of our gardens today.
Here are some of the roses I particularly love in my garden.
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