Garden plants and their hunters – Joséphine de Beauharnais

Joséphine de Beauharnais is not perhaps most famous for being a plant hunter! Born Marie Josèphe Rose de Tascher de la Pagerie in 1763, she is better known as the famous Josephine, first wife of Napoléon Bonaparte and first Empress of the French Republic. However, rose lovers remember her equally for her famous rose garden at Malmaison, her country house.

Josephine bought the dwelling in 1798, while Napoleon was campaigning in Egypt, and set about filling the grounds with all the rare and expensive flowering plants that she could get her hands on. She also hired Joseph Pierre Redouté, the greatest botanical artist of his generation, to immortalise her purchases in paintings and engravings. But more than this, she offered a bounty to any plant hunter who could bring her a new flowering plant, that could not be categorised by Napoleon’s scientific committee, and planted it in her garden, so that Malmaison became a home, not just of roses, but of strange, rare and unusual plants from around the world. This garden was thus not just a pleasure ground but a scientific endeavour and two heavily illustrated books, Jardin de Malmaison (The Garden of Malmaison), and Description des Plantes rare cultivees a Malmaison et a Navarre ( Description of the rare plants grown at Malmaison and at Navarre,) documented the contents of Josephine's gardens. Both were illustrated by Redouté, who later went on to publish his most famous work, Les Roses.

Malmaison rose photograph by Japanese boy, used under a creative commons attribution licence

Plant Hunters