Burgundy rose

About the plant

Every so often a rose throws a shoot that is a miniature of itself, and if the shoot is rooted the miniature can be kept. The Burgundy rose is a sport of this kind from the cabbage rose, recorded in gardens by 1664 and sold for three hundred years as the pompon de Bourgogne: a dense little bush no higher than the knee, with leaves the size of a fingernail and flowers barely an inch across, flat, packed with petals and deep pink shading to purple at the centre, like a rosette of ribbon pinned to the plant. It was grown in pots on windowsills and as an edging to the parterres of French gardens.

Redouté painted it at life size for the third volume of Les Roses, which appeared in 1824, and Thory, who preferred his own names, called it the Cent-feuilles de Bordeaux. It survives today in the catalogues of old-rose nurseries as Rosa centifolia 'Parvifolia', one of the oldest roses that can still be bought, and still exactly as Redouté drew it.