Stop to smell the roses in an unsung corner of Paris
Beauty, history lessons to behold in the flowers’ perfumed grasp
In Paris, it’s the season for rose sniffers. As the days lengthen toward the summer solstice, the city’s roses unfurl their petals in an exuberant palette: coral, apricot, wine-red, lavender, sunny yellow. The colors are irresistible, but it’s really the scent that gives them away.
These blooms aren’t just found in the major gardens, such as the Jardin des Plantes and the Parc de Bercy, with their dedicated rose gardens. Roses climb up old stone walls, brighten small squares and even perfume the Roland Garros stadium, where the French Open tennis tournament is held. But the best place to admire the “queen of flowers” is the Parc de Bagatelle, a western wonderland abutting the Bois de Boulogne that’s remarkably untouristed. In fact, I first visited Bagatelle only after a decade of living in Paris, and the taxi driver — when I alighted at the Pont de Neuilly metro stop — had never heard of my destination.
While tourists have returned in full force to Paris, with crowds thronging the major monuments in the city center, Bagatelle offers intriguing heritage, a chateau born of a bet with Marie Antoinette, and 59 acres of verdure about five miles from the Notre-Dame cathedral. Not to mention the riot of roses: One of four locations for the Paris Botanical Garden, Bagatelle is planted with 10,000 rose bushes representing 1,200 varieties.
It’s here in the classic rose garden where the International Competition for New Roses assembles a jury of experts — professional perfume “noses” and passionate enthusiasts — to judge new rose varieties in June. Established in 1907 as the world’s first such competition, it’s open to both amateur and professional breeders of non-commercialized roses. The competition has been canceled only once (during the Liberation of Paris in 1944), but coronavirus challenges meant adapting to virtual voting. Naturally, there’s a lot of excitement about the return of the in-person event.
“Not only can breeders present their new varieties and see how they thrive here in Paris, but it’s also a showcase for the public to see the evolution of the rose: the new colors, the new shapes,” says Jean-Pierre Lelièvre, the head of horticulture for the Bois de Boulogne.
There’s a universal fascination with the rose. Laden with symbolism, it sprouts in literature and legend, including from Persian poets and bards of English literature. Indeed, the rose is rooted in the very soil of culture: It conjured divine paradise in the tombs of ancient Egypt; bloomed in ancient Greek legends; symbolizes “eternal spring ” in China, where roses have been grown for 5,000 years; and represents the Virgin Mary for Catholics.
“Flowers are linked to our personal journey, from birth to death, and we’re instinctively drawn to the rose because it elicits emotions,” says Amy Kupec Larue, a garden guide and permanent jury member of the Bagatelle rose competition. “It’s a noble flower, elevated to a different category. You pick daisies. You cultivate roses.”
But we really owe the French rose fad to a 19th-century trendsetter. Empress Joséphine Bonaparte amassed a collection of roses at the Château de Malmaison, about five miles west of Bagatelle, that awed visitors from all over the world. (On the bicentennial of her death in 2014, the chateau revived her garden of heirloom roses and introduced a new rose, “Souvenir de Joséphine.”) Roses were a part of Joséphine’s daily routine, perfuming her rooms and even adorning her dresses.
Following the French Revolution, Bagatelle was transformed by Napoleon into a hunting lodge, then acquired in 1835 by an English aristocrat and art collector, Lord Seymour, Marquess of Hertford. In turn, his heir, Sir Richard Wallace, lived at Bagatelle, famously donating to Paris the water fountains that still bear his name. It was in 1905 that Jean-Claude Nicolas Forestier, the visionary landscape designer and curator of the Bois de Boulogne, persuaded the city of Paris to save Bagatelle from developers.
And so it was that Forestier restored the park, interspersing bulb-planted lawns with prized horticultural collections, including peonies, irises and waterlilies, along with the classic rose garden. To this aim, Forestier called on the leading rosarian of the day, Jules Gravereaux, a former executive at the Bon Marché department store who had designed Europe’s first modern roseraie, or rose garden, at his country house in a village south of Paris known today as L’Haÿ-lesRoses. On a quest to re-create Joséphine’s long-vanished collection, Gravereaux assembled so many varieties that he soon surpassed the empress, even traveling to the Balkans on his mission to showcase all known roses on the planet. Gravereaux’s donation of 1,500 varieties of roses, alongside his expertise, is what created the triumphant botanical masterpiece that now draws rose aficionados from all over the world.
“With so many different colors, flower shapes, scents, growth patterns and flowering periods, there is a rose for everyone,” Kupec Larue says, “and new ones are painstakingly created every year to be displayed and judged here.”