John Curtis del. · Weddell sculp. · Samuel Curtis, London
Week of 27 April 2026
Miss Lawrence's rose
Part 1 of 6 in Flowering shrubs
Rosa chinensis 'Minima' (published as Rosa semperflorens minima)
A tiny China rose, the ancestor of every miniature rose, drawn by John Curtis in 1815 and named for the botanical artist Mary Lawrance.
- Published
- Plate 1762, volume 42, 1815
- From
- Curtis's Botanical Magazine
- Drawn by
- John Curtis
- Engraved by
- Weddell
- Technique
- Hand-coloured copper engraving
- Family
- Rosaceae
- Native to
- A garden form of the China rose
About the plant
Until the China roses arrived, European roses flowered once, in June, and were finished. The four 'stud' roses brought from Canton in the 1790s changed that: they bloomed again and again until the frosts, and crossed with the old roses they fathered the whole modern race. Miss Lawrence's rose is the smallest of the China roses, a dwarf form with single or semi-double pink flowers no wider than a coin, and the plant in this 1815 plate stood in a pot in a London drawing room, flowering on the windowsill through the winter.
It was named for Mary Lawrance, a drawing teacher who in 1799 had published A Collection of Roses from Nature, the first book given entirely to roses and one of the most beautiful. Her name was misspelled 'Lawrence' and it stuck. The miniature rose of the twentieth century, bred from a plant found on a Swiss windowsill in 1918 and named 'Rouletii', is the same thing rediscovered.
The plate is a hand-coloured copper engraving by Weddell, after a drawing by the young John Curtis, who was drawing for the Magazine in the year its long-serving artist Sydenham Edwards walked out.
Bought together
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