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A Passion for Roses: The Empress, the Quaker, and the Flower They Loved

Presented by American Philosophical Society Museum at American Philosophical Society Museum

May 25, 2011

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Shakespeare sang the praises of the fragrant rose, but it was 200 years later when Empress Josephine and the gardeners at her private estate, Malmaison, popularized the genus rosa. Josephine, a great collector of everything animal and vegetable, set out to obtain every rose species then known. In 1814, when she died, 182 varieties of roses—mainly Gallica cultivars—were growing there. Less than ten years later, Jane and Reuben Haines, members of a distinguished Quaker family, began their ambitious tenure at Wyck in Germantown, then a village outside of Philadelphia. Jane Haines’s special passion was roses, and she planted a garden filled with many of the same roses cultivated by Josephine. Today, Jane’s garden is the oldest, continuously cultivated rose collection in the United States.

Wyck Landscape Curator Nicole Juday will discuss the gardens at Wyck and trace how Josephine’s enthusiasm for roses and rose breeding influenced 19th-century American gardens.