The Malmaison Estate was purchased by Joséphine de Beauharnais in 1799. It comprised a château and grounds that the Empress wished to transform into Europe’s most beautiful and fascinating garden. In order to accomplish this, she collected rare and exotic plants from all four corners of the world. “I find it an inexpressible joy to see foreign plant life flourishing in my gardens”, she confided to Thibaudeau. She also brought together almost 250 varieties of roses, which she had immortalised by the famous illustrator Pierre-Joseph Redouté(1759-1840).
In ‘The Old Rose Advisor’, Brent C. Dickerson has an original anecdote to tell regarding ‘Souvenir de la Malmaison’, stating that the rose’s name was due to a Russian lord who took cuttings from the variety in the grounds of Malmaison itself ! The story is unlikely to be true, however, as the rose’s creator, Jean Béluze, was well aware of its value and guarded it jealously - it is hardly likely that he would have allowed anyone to take cuttings.
Furthermore, Malmaison’s gardens had been in decline for some thirty years at the time, and the rosebush was almost certainly not growing in them.
It was not until 1909-1910 that the Malmaison Estate’s managers sought to reconstitute the Empress Joséphine’s collections. They called on the help of Jules Gravereaux, who went on to draw up a list of 198 varieties cultivated during the Imperial era. The collector published La Malmaison : Les Roses de l’Impératrice Joséphine (Editions d’Art et de Littérature, 1912) and provided his own rose garden with a copy of the list of varieties to be found in the “allée de la Malmaison”…
Category: Old horticultural variety (Bourbon).
Synonyms: Queen of Beauty and Fragrance.
Foliage: Dark green foliage.
Flowers: Large (8 cm in diameter) graceful double flowers of a delicate pink colour, blooming in quarters. They give off a deliciously heady fruity scent reminiscent of tea-rose hybrids.
Flowering: May/June to September. Reflowering.
Development: medium - about 1 metre high.
Care: A variety particularly sensitive to damp.
Use: Clumps.
Breeder: Jean Béluze.
First year marketed: 1843.
Awards: Roll of Honour, World Federation of Rose Societies Old Rose Hall of Fame, 1988
