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The Horticulturist (January 1, 1853) vol. 3 (ns), p. 51
The Bourbon Rose—Paul's Prince Albert.—Turner's Florist, for November, gives a brilliantly colored portrait of Paul's new Bourbon Rose, Prince Albert, accompanied with the following remarks:
"About thirty-five years ago, a French botanist, M. Breon, visited the island of Bourbon, and found growing, in a garden at St Benoist, a rose altogether new to him. The flowers were rosy carmine, beautifully cupped, and the petals remarkable for their size and smoothness. Our botanist did not fail to appreciate this nouveauté and sending it to Paris, it was there multiplied, and scattered abroad: this was the original Bourbon Rose. It is not a species, but an accidental hybrid, supposed to have sprung up between the common China Rose and the red Four-seasons.
Some of our readers will doubtless remember the rose Ile de Bourbon or Bourbon Jacques—for under both these names it was disseminated; and it is from this rose, variously hybridised, that all the Bourbon Roses have been obtained For the few first years most of the seedlings raised were of the same color as the original; some were finer, and many were double; one of which, Augustine Leleur remains a good rose to this day. The first variation was the production of kinds of a clear and beautiful silvery tint, then of a dark purple and crimson hue, till now we have in the subject of this notice a flower as brilliant in color, and equal in form, to almost any rose. The habit of Prince Albert is dwarf; the shoots are very robust, and well clothed with large, rich, green foliage. It usually blooms in large clusters, but does not grow rampant, like Madam Desprez, but produces short, massive shoots, more in the way of Comice de Seine et Marne, from which it is probably a seedling, although more robust, larger, brighter in color and more double. As it is of dwarf habit, and blooms freely from June till November, it will probably prove an acquisition as a bedding rose. The autumn blossoms we have observed are of a richer but less brilliant hue than those of summer.
The history of this rose is briefly this: Mr. Paul of the Chestnut Nurseries found it growing in the garden of the raiser, in the neighborhood of Fontenay-aux-Roses, near Paris; and being struck with the beauty and brilliancy of the flowers, purchased the entire stock, and now, for the first time, offers plants for sale.
The Bourbon Roses generally are hardy and easy of culture; the short-wooded, free blooming kinds require two annual dressings of manure and close pruning; they are then the most beautiful of autumn roses, flowering better and more abundantly late in the season than in summer, fine flowers often expanding at the end of October."
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