Bouquet "Rose Banquet"

A garden spray rose bouquet built on one variety, Julietta. Each stem carries several heads, each cupped and crowded like a peony, peach on the outside and coral at the centre. Ten stems already look lavish in the photograph. Fifty is a different proposition altogether.

A wild rose has five petals. In a double rose, some of the stamens, the parts meant to carry pollen, develop as petals instead. That swap is the whole secret of a peony-shaped rose: the flower gives up part of its means of reproduction and spends it on volume.

Julietta comes from Delbard, a French rose house. Georges Delbard put his first roses on the market only in 1954, because creating, stabilising and multiplying a variety takes at least ten years. Julietta is a young one: growers in Kenya have been producing it only since the mid-2010s, and it was there that a raspberry-coloured sport appeared on the plants, the same rose in a deeper colour. If you would like it in raspberry, ask on WhatsApp before you order.

In 1888, Lawrence Alma-Tadema painted The Roses of Heliogabalus for the engineer Sir John Aird, who paid him £4,000. It shows a Roman emperor's guests disappearing under petals released from a false ceiling. It was winter in London, so for four months roses were sent to the studio every week from the French Riviera. The petals on the canvas are pink and cream, close to Julietta's own colour.

Nothing about it is restrained. It belongs to a dinner that turned into a party, to a flat full of people on the night you got the keys, to an apology that needed to be bigger than words.

Delivered in Paris, Monday to Saturday; delivery is free from €100.