Rosa ‘Madame Isaac Pérère’

In 1841, a quiet nurseryman in the village of Belleville, just outside Paris, crossed two unnamed seedlings and waited five seasons for the result. Rosa ‘Madame Isaac Pérère’ arrived named for the wife of a nearby magistrate, and within a decade it had crossed the Atlantic to the gardens of Longwood, Biltmore, and the new wave of American rosarians who were beginning to take the old European cultivars seriously.

It is, by every measure we trust, a Bourbon — that short, brilliant dynasty of roses bred on the Île Bourbon in the Indian Ocean and refined through the great French gardens of the 1830s and 40s. The class gives it two gifts: the ability to flower repeatedly through summer, and a perfume that is heavy, sweet, and faintly fruit-soured, the way raspberry leaves smell after a slow rain. We smell the raspberry first, then the damask core, and finally a clean green note that lingers into evening.

The flowers open a deep, almost startling rose-pink and fade, over eight or nine days in the vase, to a softer mother-of-pearl. They are quartered — that is, the petals fold inward in four soft sections, giving the bloom the ordered, pleated look of a damask tablecloth. The shrub itself is generous rather than tidy: five to seven feet tall, four to five wide, with smooth, leathery foliage that shrugs off blackspot in the dry Willamette summers.

Of the four hundred-odd Bourbons introduced between 1820 and 1870, perhaps thirty remain in commerce. Of those, we grow nine. Mme. Isaac Pérère is, in our considered opinion, the one to plant first. It will outlive the fence it is planted against and still be flowering when the grandchildren arrive.

— The Hisako Roses Master Grafter Team, written between grafts.