The Empress Joséphine did not mince her words. “The only thing that ever came between us was my debts, certainly not his manhood,” she said of husband Napoléon. And some debts those were. Early in the landscaping of her Château de Malmaison, she had run up a £2,600 bill with London nurserymen Lee and Kennedy.
In less than a decade, she had risen from the shadow of the guillotine to femme du monde, perhaps the most influential woman in France.
Born Marie Joséphe Rose Tascher de La Pagerie on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia on 23 June 1763, at the age of 17 she accompanied her father to France. There she quickly married a fellow islander, Alexandre de Beauharnais, a political figure and general during French Revolution. She bore him two children, a son and daughter, before the impact of Grande Peur, the ‘Great Fear’ engulfed them. Thrown into the same prison was her husband on 21 April 1794, three months later they both went their own ways, he as an accused aristo to the guillotine, she released but as a widow with two young children.
As such, Josephine had affairs with several leading political figures before meeting Napoleon in 1795 and marrying the young arriviste general the following year. Almost immediately, she accompanied him on his lightning Italian campaign. “Patience, my darling,” he reassured her. “We will have time to make love when the war is won.” This is almost certainly the basis of the well-known, “Not tonight, Josephine” that the French indignantly deny him ever have saying.
Only a year later, though he was off to battle in Egypt. It was then that Josephine purchased the 14th century Château de Malmaison, eight kilometres from Paris, and its 150 acres of dowdy surrounding grounds. And she did it, much to her husband’s disgust, on borrowed money – over 300,000 francs. It was to cost even more to renovate and become truly a beaulieu, a beautiful place.
First to be decided, though, was the style the landscaping should take. Much to her husband’s horror, she directed that this be à l’anglaise, an English landscape, popular then for half a century. Worse still in Napoleon’s eyes was the importation of landscapers and horticulturists from the United Kingdom. These included Thomas Blaikie, a Scottish horticultural expert, another Écosse gardener, Alexander Howatson, Joining them were her countrymen, the botanist, Étienne Pierre Ventenat and the horticulturist Andre Dupont.
A few years later, Ventenat (1757-1808) was able to publish a tome describing rare species in the gardens and greenhouses Le Jardin de la Malmaison (1803). Josephine’s head horticulturalist Dupont (1756-1817) left an even more lasting recognition of the gardens. He began breeding roses at Malmaison. His 1813 catalogue of them there listed nearly 200 varieties. This despite that the rose garden was said to have been designed in the pattern of the Union Jack.
France became the cradle of roses – by 1830 some Parisian nurseries listed over 2,500 varieties. It is probable that much of the success in raising delicate new rose varieties lay in them being grafted. Rosa canina was the prefer rootstock. Would that this practice was followed today, instead of the easier and more quickly raised Rosa multiflora rootstock. R. canina imparts more hardiness but takes two years to cultivate, too long for most commercial growers.
It is to Josephine and her encouragement of chief horticulturalist Dupont that laid the foundation for modern roses. The Empress’s floral pursuits did not end there though – far from it. Under her direct – and deep purse – Malmaison was to become a paradise of new, exotique introductions from across the seas.
During the little more than a decade Josephine reigned at Château de Malmaison, France and Britain, with the exception of a few brief months, were continuously at war. Britannia ruled the waves and effectively blockaded French ports. Ever since French warships allowed explorer Captain James Cook unmolested rights on his famous voyages there had been a certain je ne sais quoi between the combatants. The Royal Navy extended this to any and all shipments of seeds and plants destined for the gardens at Malmaison. Commanders of His Britannic Majesty’s ship were given specific orders to hasten on such shipments with all possible dispatch.
So it was that Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States of America, and so different from the present one, was able to dispatch samples of the newly discovered plants by Lewis and Clarke on their epic journeys across the continent and back from May 1804 through September 1806.
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There was also available safe conduct passes. That was how the Malmaison garden experts moved back and forth from the United Kingdom to France, bringing with them exciting new plants.
Thomas Blaikie and Alexander Howatson travelled in this manner. So did Lewis Kennedy, grandson of a founder of Lee and Kennedy at the Vineyard Nursery in Hammersmith, London, where Josephine ran up those enormous bills.
Alas, though Napoleon became enamoured with Malmaison, even moving the government there for a few years, he tired of Josephine and sought a younger wife. Poor divorced Josephine could only resort to “pruning her roses,’ as one writer has suggested. She died of the bacterial diphtheria, age just 50, on 29 May 1814. Today, vaccination would have assured her decades more of gardening.
Wes Porter is a horticultural consultant and writer based in Toronto. Wes has over 40 years of experience in both temperate and tropical horticulture from three continents.
The Empress Joséphine did not mince her words. “The only thing that ever came between us was my debts, certainly not his manhood,” she said of husband Napoléon. And some debts those were. Early in the landscaping of her Château de Malmaison, she had run up a £2,600 bill with London nurserymen Lee and Kennedy.
In less than a decade, she had risen from the shadow of the guillotine to femme du monde, perhaps the most influential woman in France.
Born Marie Joséphe Rose Tascher de La Pagerie on the Caribbean island of St. Lucia on 23 June 1763, at the age of 17 she accompanied her father to France. There she quickly married a fellow islander, Alexandre de Beauharnais, a political figure and general during French Revolution. She bore him two children, a son and daughter, before the impact of Grande Peur, the ‘Great Fear’ engulfed them. Thrown into the same prison was her husband on 21 April 1794, three months later they both went their own ways, he as an accused aristo to the guillotine, she released but as a widow with two young children.
