Many-flowered rose

About the plant

The roses of Europe flowered once, in June, one or a few to a stem. The roses that came from China around 1800 changed that, and this one changed the shape of the rose bush: Rosa multiflora, a rambler of Japan, Korea and China whose small flowers come by the dozen in branched trusses, the way lilac or elder flower. The double flesh-pink garden form that Redouté painted was sent from Canton in 1804 by Thomas Evans, a clerk of the East India Company with a garden at Stepney, and the Empress Josephine had it at Malmaison within a few years.

Crossed with the China roses it gave the dwarf polyanthas of the 1870s, and they in turn gave the floribundas, the cluster-flowered bush roses of every municipal bed; and the wild species, tough and easy from seed, became the rootstock on which most of the world's roses are budded. Redouté drew the whole truss, a dozen flowers and buds on one spray, in the manner of a Dutch flower painting, and Thory described it in the second volume of Les Roses in 1821.