Rosa Indica Autumnalis
Le Bangale d’Automne
Le Bangale d’Automne
About this plate
Description
Arbrisseau qui s’élève en buisson à un pied et demi, ou en-viron. Les tiges sont armées de quelques petits aiguillons épars: parfois, les rameaux florifères en sont dépourvus. Les feuilles se composent de cinq folioles à surface ondulée ou gaufrée, comme celles de l’Indica multipetala, mais plus petites, fermes au toucher, dentées en scie, et glabres. Ces mêmes fo-lioles sont rougeâtres quand elles commencent à se développer. Elles sont portées par des pétioles munis, en-dessous, de quelques petits aiguillons jaunâtres; à leur base sont des stipules étroites, bifides au sommet, denticulées en leur bord. Les fleurs, tantôt solitaires, tantôt réunies par deux, naissent à l’extrémité des rameaux. Les pédoncules qui les supportent sont garnis de poils glanduleux. Les tubes des calices sont presque ronds, comme turbinés et glabres. Corolle de cinq à six rangs de pétales, d’un beau rose nuancé de violet. Les divisions du limbe sont entières, pointues au sommet, cotonneuses à l’intérieur, et glabres à l’extérieur. Le fruit est presque globuleux, et rouge à la maturité.
Observations
Cette sous-variété du R. Indica multipetala, se couvre d’un grand nombre de boutons au printemps et dans l’été; mais tous avortent et se détachent avant l’épanouissement dans ces deux saisons. Ce n’est qu’à l’automne, vers le milieu du mois de septembre, que s’ouvrent complètement les boutons nouveaux que ce Rosier produit toujours en abondance. C’est M. le docteur Cartier qui nous a communiqué cet arbrisseau, qu’il a obtenu de semence dans sa belle Roseraie. Il supporte bien les gelées. Il a passé l’hiver dernier (1822) dans nos plates-bandes de terre. de bruyère, et il est aujourd’hui très-vigoureux.
Twelve ways of seeing
- measured cast red
- upright 1.52 : 1
- published 1824
- Plate 161
Not a catalogue entry but a way of looking: how to stand, what to notice, how the line was cut, when it flowers, where it came from, who made it — and then the poems and the classics that taught China to see the same flower. Read the twelve in order and the plate opens.
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First Look
搜尽奇峰打草稿。
—— 清·石涛《苦瓜和尚画语录》
Exhaust the strange peaks, and then make the sketch.
The sheet is vertical: the eye climbs and settles in the upper half. Let the plant stand before you look for detail. Then step in close: watch where colour meets line, and whether the line ever breaks. Third, find where the green is deepest: the whole tonal order is measured from that patch. The pose leans left: the upper half carries 28 points further left than the lower — a living thing, not a diagram.
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Name and Thing
Only the genus Rosa is given; species-level names came later. No established Chinese name exists, so it is cited by its binomial alone.
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Form and Colour
Measured on this plate: flower colour covers 8.7% of the sheet, foliage 7.8%, the cast red. No other plate shares exactly this measure. Roses are shrubs or scramblers with pinnate leaves of three to seven serrated leaflets; the double flowers open in crumpled, inward-curling layers around a small knot of yellow stamens. Filed under green — a moss green, a colour that comes mostly from leaf and stem. A single plant, laid out with nothing hidden.
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Composition
Tall and narrow, the plant rising in one movement with generous margins — the upright format of most floras. (about 1.52 : 1) No details are appended: a plate for looking, not for keying out. The plant covers only 24% of the sheet, centred a little left of centre; the emptiness is where the eye rests. Old plates set the plant slightly off centre, with unequal margins — that small imbalance is what keeps it alive.
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Line and Colour
The first half of the nineteenth century moved from copper to steel to lithography; stipple could render the softest transition. There is evidence on the back too: the plate mark pressed into the paper, the slight relief of the pigment, lines worn shallow in a later printing.
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Season
Late spring into early summer, peaking in May — the first flush of the garden year. The year 1824 on the plate is that of publication, not of flowering — the gathering came a year or two earlier. Note the season. Phenology is the most practical tool of appreciation.
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Provenance
Widespread in the temperate north. Chinese gardeners knew roses since the Han; the ever-blooming modern rose is a nineteenth-century crossing of European and Chinese stock. The localities on the plate are those of a century ago; plants travel and places change their names.
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The Book and the Hand
“Les Roses” was drawn by Pierre-Joseph Redouté and published 1817-1824. This plate is Plate 161, book page 161. The image is public domain; the hand-colouring is still one person's hand.
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Poetic Resonance
有情芍药含春泪，无力蔷薇卧晓枝。
—— 宋·秦观《春日》
The peony, feeling, holds spring tears; the rose, strengthless, lies across the morning branch.
The poem gives the mood first and the picture supplies the form; set the line beside the plate and the green the corolla becomes its resting point.
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The Written Tradition
插花不可太繁，亦不可太瘦。多不过二种三种，高低疏密，如画苑布置方妙。
—— 明·袁宏道《瓶史·宜称》
Flowers should be set neither too crowded nor too sparse — two or three kinds at most, tall and low, dense and open, arranged as a painter would compose.
Tradition places roses in the Han imperial park; Song and Ming manuals named the double forms 'Baoxiang' and 'Ten Sisters', and Qing compendia separated rose, rugosa and monthly rose. You need not parse every word: take the line, and the flower acquires a second face.
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Symbolism
In Europe the rose means love and secrecy ('sub rosa'); in Chinese verse the rambling rose leans and clings — lingering attachment rather than ardour. Flower language was added later; the flower knows nothing of it, and that innocence is part of its power.
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What to Take Away
If you keep one line, keep Guo Xi's: from afar its momentum, up close its texture. Two centuries on, the plant may still flower in some garden; the one on this sheet stopped in the season of 1824.
