“It’s funny, how far a glass of champagne can sometimes lead.”

It’s April 2025, and I’m standing in a muddy field in Hereford. The line you just read has been spoken by an attractive blonde woman wearing a lapel microphone. I too am wearing a microphone, and a few feet away, another woman is filming us both and recording our conversation. “Sorry, can we try that again? I loved the line about the glass of champagne, but I don’t think our CEO will like it.”

We start the conversation again, this time without the champagne line. We’re talking about roses. One rose in particular, a new variety to be launched in less than a month at the Chelsea Flower Show. That’s where this story begins, I suppose, at last year’s Chelsea Flower Show, where I’d stopped by for a glass of champagne in a tent where a group of people were helping launch a new rose into the world. Turns out that a rose launch is not unlike a book launch: there are guests, photographers, champagne and of course the rose itself, which, like a novel, represents many, many hours of hard work behind the scenes from people who may not attend this day of celebration.

Except that of course, this story began many years before all that. Stories have a habit of grafting themselves onto old stock, creating new growth, new narratives from something that . And this one goes back to Barnsley in the 1930s, to a man who never once drank champagne, or came to the Chelsea Flower Show. But my grandfather was a gardener. The son of a family of coal miners, he longed for a garden of his own, and his father reluctantly allowed him to cultivate a strip of land alongside their house as long as he grew food for the family. But Granddad was a romantic. He secretly loved flowers. I have a photograph of him in his garden, aged about eighteen, surrounded by giant cabbages. And cunningly placed among them, taking hardly any space, are roses, heads modestly hidden beneath the spreading leaves of the vegetables.

Those roses. I don’t know what colour they were, but I do know they were scented. He used to say that a scentless rose was like chips without salt and vinegar. The back of his house was given over to fruit trees, rhubarb, vegetables. But the front was all roses; all scented; in every possible colour. And all the roses had names, because each one was a story. I often used to wonder how the roses had been named; pored over his catalogues; sometimes made up stories about the most evocative. Jeanne d’Arc. Old Blush. Ispahan. Albertine. Sometimes I tried to make rosewater by cramming petals into a jar: the results were never very satisfactory, but it never stopped me trying. But what I really wanted was to have the chance to name a rose: to tell its story to the world through leaves and shoots and flowers. It was a little girl’s fantasy; but when I came to mention it that year, at the Chelsea flower Show, the lady I was talking to handed me that glass of champagne and said: “We can make that happen.”

The lady in question was Heidi Towse, from Blue Diamond Garden Centres. I’d met her through my cousin, Jill, who had invited me that day. My grandfather would have loved that: he’d never been to Chelsea, but he’d always wanted to go (I suspect that to him, travelling as far as London for a flower show seemed too much of an indulgence.) But picture the excitement of fulfilling that little girl’s fantasy: my grandfather died long before I could show him the novels I’d had published, but I suspect that naming a rose would have impressed him more than all of my books put together.

There followed a lot of e-mails about what kind of rose I wanted to name; what colour, what scent. (A scented one. Of course. My grandfather would have accepted no less.) The colour was more of a difficult choice: I have a kind of synaesthesia that means that I smell colours, and so the colour of a rose often smells very different to its actual scent. But by then I’d decided what my rose’s story would be. It’s a story you probably know, about a woman called Vianne Rocher, and the village in which she opens a shop. I wanted to name my rose after her, to acknowledge all she has meant to me over the past twenty-six years. And so I decided upon a rose of a very particular shade: a kind of dusky, damask red which, to me, smells of chocolate. And after some discussion with the German nursery, I decided on a name.

Of course, I hadn’t seen the rose at that point. I’d only seen it in photographs, but I was assured that in the spring I would get to see it grow. The roses begin their journey in a German nursery, Rosen Tantau. Then they travel to Britain, where they are prepared to meet the public. Which is why I’m in Hereford today, at one of Allensmore Nurseries, one of Blue Diamond’s suppliers, in a muddy field in which thousands of tiny rose bushes, no more than three of four inches long, are lined up in the deep red soil. These are the stock onto which my rose will be grafted: they will be kept over winter and sold to the public the following year. They don’t look much at the moment, but, like stories, they will grow, making roots and buds and leaves. By summer 2026, this whole field will be awash with the with the colour and scent of these roses, named after the heroine of my new novel, Vianne: the origin story of Vianne Rocher on her journey towards Chocolat. And on May 22^nd, when my novel launches, my rose will launch alongside it, at the Chelsea Flower Show, and at Blue Diamond garden centres all over the country. I visit a part of the nursery where almost 500 rose bushes in pots stand waiting in neat rows. These will go on sale next month; in June they will be in flower. Jeff, who manages the nursery, insists on giving me one to take home. I bring it back with me on the train, swaddled in a waterproof bag. I mean to plant it by the shed that serves as my garden office. Next year, I may be able to smell its flowers from my window.

The rose has such a powerful role in literature around the world. Legends are built around it. Poets from Shakespeare to Sappho found inspiration in its scent. And over and over we see it as a symbol of the heart – just as the ancient Mayans saw the cacao bean as a human heart. In fact, chocolate and roses are often seen together. Both are symbols of romantic love. Both are laden with stories. And, I hope, my rose will bring all those stories together in one flower, which to me will smell of bitter chocolate and rose, and maybe grow stories of its own in flower gardens all over the world.

It’s funny how far a glass of champagne, or a taste of chocolate, or a seedling, or a story, can lead. All have their own narratives. All in their way are transformative. All are the product of long months of work by many individuals. And all are celebratory, speaking to the part of us that longs for something magical, something that grows beyond what we previously expected.

The name of the rose is Vianne’s Chocolat.

My Granddad would have understood.