Saint Bernadette and the rose.

I blipped this rose bush back in June; it is still covered in flowers despite this week's gales and deluge. The rose is the variety named Bernadette, after St Bernadette of Lourdes.

Marie Bernadette Soubirous was the firstborn daughter of a miller from Lourdes, France, and is venerated as a Saint in the Catholic Church. In the 1850s Bernadette claimed to have seen, on 18 separate occasions, an apparition of a young woman, in a riverside grotto in Lourdes, France. (Lourdes is shown on the location map.) She described the lady, now regarded by the church as a manifestation of the Virgin Mary, as wearing a white veil, a blue girdle and with a yellow rose on each foot.

Bernadette died of long-term tuberculosis at the age of 35 on 16 April 1879. The Church exhumed her body on 22 September 1909, in 1919 and again in 1925. On each occasion the body was said to be incorrupt, preserved from decomposition.

Bernadette Soubirous was declared venerable by Pope Pius X, and "Blessed" on 14 June 1925, by Pope Pius XI. She was officially canonized a Saint by Pope Pius XI on 8 December 1933.