Most history books will tell you that Empress Josephine was a woman who gained the world and then lost it all. She rose to the height of imperial power, only to lose her marriage to politics and her crown to history. But if you look at the landscape of modern horticulture, that narrative is incomplete. While her political power faded, her influence on science and nature only grew.
While Napoleon was busy redrawing the maps of Europe with gunpowder, Josephine was at the Château de Malmaison redrawing the map of the natural world. She didn’t just plant a garden. She assembled a living museum and a scientific hub that would help turn France into the rose capital of the world for the next century. Her ambition was so formidable that even the strict trade blockades of the Napoleonic Wars had to make exceptions.
The Enemy Collaborator
To understand the scale of Josephine’s obsession, you have to look at the English Channel in the early 1800s. Britain and France were locked in a bitter and strangling war. The naval blockade was tight and very little was supposed to get through.
Except for the roses.
Josephine had a contact in London named John Kennedy, a nurseryman at the Vineyard Nursery in Hammersmith. Through a mix of diplomatic maneuvering, scientific exemption, and perhaps a bit of willful ignorance by the authorities, Kennedy managed to send crates of rare China roses across enemy lines to the Empress. It suggests a fascinating hierarchy of values where nations might be at war but the international brotherhood of botany operated under a different flag. The Admiralty may not have issued a formal passport for petals, but the scientific community helped ensure the shipments continued despite the cannons.
The Laboratory of the Rose
Before Malmaison, European rose gardening was often a game of chance. Gardeners would mostly plant seeds and hope that nature, or a passing bee, would accidentally create a sport or a genetic mutant with a new color or shape.
Josephine didn’t have the patience for chance. She employed André Dupont, a brilliant horticulturist who helped pioneer one of the earliest sustained programs of deliberate, artificial pollination. Dupont wasn’t content to wait for bees. He began stripping the pollen from one bloom and deliberately applying it to another.
This marked a shift from simply collecting nature to actively shaping it. Under this new rigorous approach, the number of rose varieties in France began to climb. We moved from a limited palette of known species to a burgeoning catalog of new, human-made hybrids. Malmaison became a central hub for this work, and the genetics developed there laid the foundation for the explosion of thousands of varieties we see in later records.
The Soldier and the Rescue
This is where the legacy of Malmaison moves beyond the palace walls and helps kickstart an industry. The sheer volume of money Josephine pumped into the trade alerted smart men that roses were a business.
One of those men was Jean-Pierre Vibert. Vibert had been a soldier in Napoleon’s army and was severely wounded in Naples. Broken by the war, he returned to Paris and opened a shop next door to André Dupont’s garden, where he watched the Empress’s gardener at work. Inspiring him to enter the trade, Vibert became the link between the palace and the public.
In 1815, as Napoleon’s empire collapsed and the Allied armies marched on Paris, a panic set in. Another breeder named Jacques-Louis Descemet had a nursery filled with 10,000 seedlings. Descemet was one of Josephine’s key suppliers, a man who had turned her demand for roses into a massive breeding operation. However, his nursery lay directly in the path of the advancing troops.
In a moment of crucial foresight, Vibert stepped in. During the chaotic days before the occupation, he managed to acquire and transport Descemet’s breeding stock to safety. It was a savvy act of preservation. Vibert saved the genetics that would define the 19th century. Because of that intervention, the lineage of roses Josephine had championed survived the fall of her husband’s empire.
The Factory of Immortality
Josephine knew that flowers eventually die. She needed a way to make them permanent. She hired the Raphael of Flowers, Pierre-Joseph Redouté, but she didn’t just want paintings. She wanted to broadcast her collection to the world.
The production of Redouté’s masterpiece, Les Roses, was a technological marvel of the 1820s. Full-color printing as we know it didn’t exist yet. To create these images, Redouté used stipple engraving which involved creating the image out of thousands of tiny dots on a copper plate.
But the plate was just the skeleton. To get the color, Redouté employed a team of young women, skilled colorists who sat in workshops applying watercolor to every single printed page by hand. One woman might paint only the leaves while another applied the pink wash of the petals.
This process made the books astronomical in price. A single set could cost the equivalent of a skilled worker’s annual wages. It wasn’t just a book. It was a hand-finished art collection. Napoleon reportedly balked at the expense of her projects, but Josephine understood something he didn’t. She knew the Empire would fall, but the books would last.
A Lasting Legacy
Today, if you visit the Château de Malmaison, you won’t find the great collection that Josephine assembled. The original glasshouses are gone, and the plants have long since been dispersed. The collection didn’t survive in the ground at Malmaison; it survived by moving out into the world.
When you walk into a garden center in London or Paris or New York, you are seeing the results of that dispersion. The Tea Roses, the Bourbons, and the systematic hybrids trace much of their modern lineage back to the money she spent and the scientists she protected. Napoleon conquered Europe, but he couldn’t hold it. Josephine conquered the rose, and she never let go.
Jason is the owner of Fraser Valley Rose Farm, a nursery in British Columbia specializing in roses and perennials. Through his YouTube channel and website, he shares practical advice on gardening and plant propagation, helping gardeners grow thriving plants and better understand rose care.
