It had long been a dream of mine to visit the famed rose garden, Roseraie du Val-de-Marne, once known as Roseraie de L'Haÿ.
by John Bagnasco
It had long been a dream of mine to visit the famed rose garden, Roseraie du Val-de-Marne, once known as Roseraie de L’Haÿ. Our garden tour of France and Italy in 2017 provided an excellent opportunity since the garden was about 45 minutes from our hotel in Paris. Public transportation provided us with an extra bit of adventure as we discovered the practicality of Parisian mass transit.
At the age of 14, Jules Gravereaux, the son of a cabinet maker from Vitry-sur-Seine, went to work for the owners of the Bon Marché department store in Paris. There he made his career and his fortune, until his retirement at the age of 48. In 1892, he acquired a property in the town of l’Haÿ, which became the family home. Gravereaux was passionate about photography and spent too many hours indoors, developing his prints. Anxious to encourage her husband to get out and benefit from the fresh air, Madame Gravereaux asked him to create a garden and the idea of the rose garden was born. In 1894, Gravereaux started his collection and hired the famous landscape architect Edouard Andre to lay out a garden containing 1600 roses. The garden claims to be the first ever garden dedicated exclusively to roses.
Gravereaux collected roses from all over Europe, and started to create new hybrids for the production of rose oil for perfume, which would facilitate the process of distillation. He worked on hybrids of Rosa rugosa and developed the very fragrant, crimson-purple, rugosa hybrid cultivar, ‘Rose à parfum de L’Haÿ’, among others. In 1911, Gravereaux helped recreate the rose collection of Joséphine de Beauharnais at her Château de Malmaison by researching all species and cultivars available in Europe in her lifetime, and donating the 197 roses his research turned up. This list included 107 gallicas, 27 centifolias, 3 mosses, 9 damasks, 22 Bengals, 4 spinosissimas, 8 albas, 3 luteas, 1 musk, and about a dozen species. Roseraie de L’Haÿ reached peak capacity at 8000 roses in 1910 and contained every rose type known at the time!