Editing Joséphine de Beauharnais (section)

==Patroness of roses==
[[File:Rosa 'Souvenir de la Malmaison' 1.jpg|thumb|[[Rosa 'Souvenir de la Malmaison'|'Souvenir de la Malmaison']]|upright]]

In 1799 while Napoleon was in Egypt, Joséphine purchased the Chateau de Malmaison.<ref name="bechtel">Bechtel, Edwin de Turk. 1949, reprinted 2010. "Our Rose Varieties and their Malmaison Heritage". ''The OGR and Shrub Journal'', The American Rose Society. 7(3)</ref> She had it landscaped in an [[English landscape garden|English style]], hiring landscapers and horticulturalists from Britain. These included [[Thomas Blaikie (gardener)|Thomas Blaikie]], a Scottish horticultural expert, another Scottish gardener, Alexander Howatson, the botanist, [[Étienne Pierre Ventenat|Ventenat]], and the horticulturist, André Dupont. The rose garden was begun soon after purchase; inspired by Dupont's love of roses. Joséphine took a personal interest in the gardens and the roses, and learned a great deal about botany and horticulture from her staff. Joséphine wanted to collect all known roses so Napoleon ordered his warship commanders to search all seized vessels for plants to be forwarded to Malmaison.

[[Pierre-Joseph Redouté]] was commissioned by her to paint the flowers from her gardens. ''Les Roses'' was published 1817–20 with 168 plates of roses; 75–80 of the roses grew at Malmaison. The English nursery [[Lee and Kennedy]] was a major supplier, despite Britain and France being at war, his shipments were allowed to cross blockades. Specifically, when Hume's Blush Tea-Scented China was imported to England from China, the British and French Admiralties made arrangements in 1810 for specimens to cross naval blockades for Joséphine's garden.<ref name="thomas">Thomas, Graham Stuart (2004). ''The Graham Stuart Thomas Rose Book''. London, England: Frances Lincoln Limited. {{ISBN|0-7112-2397-1}}.</ref> Sir [[Joseph Banks]], Director of the [[Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew]], also sent her roses.

The general assumption is that she had about 250 roses in her garden when she died in 1814. Unfortunately the roses were not catalogued during her tenure. There may have been only 197 rose varieties in existence in 1814, according to calculations by [[Jules Gravereaux]] of Roseraie de l’Haye. There were 12 species, about 40 centifolias, mosses and damasks, 20 Bengals, and about 100 gallicas. The botanist Claude Antoine Thory, who wrote the descriptions for Redouté's paintings in ''Les Roses'', noted that Joséphine's Bengal rose R. indica had black spots on it.<ref name="name" /> She produced the first written history of the cultivation of roses, and is believed to have hosted the first rose exhibition, in 1810.<ref>{{cite journal|last=Bowermaster|first=Russ|title=Judging: From Whence to Hence|journal=The American Rose Annual|year=1993|pages=72–73}}</ref>

[[File:Rosa Josephine de Beauharnais 2019-06-04 5169.jpg|thumb|Rosa Joséphine de Beauharnais|upright]]

Modern hybridization of roses through artificial, controlled pollination began with Joséphine's horticulturalist Andre Dupont.<ref name="bechtel" /> Prior to this, most new rose cultivars were spontaneous mutations or accidental, bee-induced hybrids, and appeared rarely. With controlled pollination, the appearance of new cultivars grew exponentially. Of the roughly 200 types of roses known to Joséphine, Dupont had created 25 while in her employ. Subsequent French hybridizers created over 1000 new rose cultivars in the 30 years following Joséphine's death. In 1910, less than 100 years after her death, there were about 8000 rose types in Gravereaux's garden. Bechtel also feels that the popularity of roses as garden plants was boosted by Joséphine's patronage. She was a popular ruler and fashionable people copied her.

Brenner and Scanniello call her the "Godmother of modern rosomaniacs" and attribute her with our modern style of vernacular cultivar names as opposed to Latinized, pseudo-scientific cultivar names. For instance, ''R. alba incarnata'' became "Cuisse de Nymphe Emue" in her garden. After Joséphine's death in 1814 the house was vacant at times, the garden and house ransacked and vandalised, and the garden's remains were destroyed in a battle in 1870. 

[[File:Rosa 'Empress Josephine'.jpg|thumb|{{ill|Impératrice Joséphine (rose)|fr|Impératrice Joséphine (rose)|lt=Impératrice Joséphine|italic=yes}}|upright]]

{{ill|Jacques-Louis Descemet|fr|Jacques-Louis Descemet}} dedicated {{ill|Impératrice Joséphine (rose)|fr|Impératrice Joséphine (rose)|lt=Impératrice Joséphine|italic=yes}} to her sometime before 1815. Similarly, [[Jean-Pierre Vibert]] dedicated ''[https://www.helpmefind.com/rose/l.php?l=2.24182 Joséphine Beauharnais]'' in her honor in 1823. The rose [[Rosa 'Souvenir de la Malmaison'|'Souvenir de la Malmaison']] appeared in 1844, 30 years after her death, named in her honor by a Russian Grand Duke planting one of the first specimens in the Imperial Garden in St. Petersburg.<ref name="name">Brenner, Douglas, and Scanniello, Stephen (2009). ''A Rose by Any Name''. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: Algonquin Books.</ref>