I am a novice rose lover and just back from an holiday trip on La Réunion island, formerly Bourbon island. Knowing it was the birth place of Bourbon roses, I went there expecting to see roses, especially as it is now spring down there. Here is what I found.

I was surprised not to see as many roses as I expected. I visited the "Jardin de l'Etat", in the main town St Denis de la Réunion, and found no roseraie there. I found roses in the private gardens, mostly in the center of the island which has a temperate climate, and on the east coast with a humid tropical climate. I felt very frustrated not to be able to tell what I actually saw: Bourbon roses or not ? OGRs ? There were many ramblers, with light pink little flowers; occasionally bigger flowers, still light pink or pink touched with yellow... If only someone would search the island, being able to identify what he saw, I wonder what would be the result: are some of this roses descendants of the first Bourbon?

I did make an unexpected discovery: at 2500 meters [about 8,000 feet] above the sea, among the last heath bushes, two rose bushes, hardly opening their leaves. Little leaves, looking a lot like rugosas, with a very large winged petiole. Unfortunately, the only flower bud I saw was far from opening and I couldn't tell what the flower looked like. I couldn't imagine what they were doing there: though the place was somewhat inhabited (a mountain stopping-place for hikers), who would have thought of planting roses there ?

What kind of roses would have survived, at the upper limit of vegetation? Could they be wild roses? I thought there were no wild roses south of the equator ? Please tell me I found a new species, or rather if my description is sufficient, to put a name on this survivor.

Brenct Dickerson in The Old Rose Advisor provides this entry from Thomas Rivers' The Rose-Amateur's Guide: Monsieur Breon, a French botanist, gives the following account... 'At the Isle of Bourbon, the inhabitants generally enclose their land with hedges made of two rows of roses, one row of the common China Rose [presumably 'Parsons' Pink'], the other of the Red Four-Seasons [presumably the red 'Tous-les-Mois']. Monsieur Perichon, a proprietor at Saint Benoist, in the Isle, in planting one of these hedges, found among his young plants one very different from the others in its shoots and foliage. This induced him to plant it in his garden. It flowered the following year; and, as he anticipated, proved to be quite a new race, and differing much from the above two roses, which, at the time, were the only two sorts known in the island.' Monsieur Breon arrived at Bourbon in 1817, as botanical traveller for the government of France, and curator of the Botanical and Naturalization Garden there. He propagated this rose very largely, and sent plants and seeds of it, in 1822, to Monsieur Jacques, gardener at the Chateau de Neuilly, near Paris, who distributed them among the rose cultivators of France.

In Old Roses and English Roses, David Austin writes: [Bourbon] roses take their name from l'Île de Bourbon, a small island near Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, now known as Réunion. It is said that farmers of this island were in the habit of planting both the 'Autumn Damask' and the 'Old Blush China' together as hedges... there was always a chance that a hybrid would arise, and this, in fact, is what happened. The Parisian botanist Bréon found a rose growing in the garden of a man named A.M. Perchern. This rose was intermediate between the 'Autumn Damask' and the 'Old Blush China' and had been grown in the island for some years under the name 'Rose Edward'. Bréon sent seed of this rose to his friend Jacques, gardener to King Louis-Philippe, and from this seed a rose called 'Rosier de l'Île de Bourbon' was raised. It was distributed in France in 1823 and two years later in England... [The Bourbons] still retain the character of the Old Roses with their strong fragrance, and they still have shrubby growth, but their leaves and stems begin to look more like those of the Hybrid Tea, and they are nearly all repeat flowering.
[Also from The Old Rose Advisor, p. 94, Dickerson provides this entry written by Monsieur Jacques and published in the Journal des Roses:] "In October or November 1819, I received from the Ile-Bourbon a large collection of seeds of trees and shrubs; they were sent to me by Mons Breon, then chief gardener of the isle's royal possessions, an done of my good friends. In the number were found five rose-hips without any name other than that of 'Rosier del'Ile Bourbon'. At the end of November, I sowed all the seeds in hot-beds, and, along with the others, the roses. Come spring, five individuals came up and, after having been pricke dout, raised in pots, and having passed the winter in a cold-frame, two bloomed and rebloomed well enough in the spring of 1821; one had semi-double flowers of a brilliant pink, and served that same year as a model for Redoute's picture, and was then propagated under the name 'Rosier de Bourbon'; the other was also propagated, but wasn't drawn."