The most famous poem of early modern France—perhaps of all French literature—is a poem about a plant. And yet the combined forces of anthropocentrism, zoocentrism, and historicism have made it very difficult to perceive that plant as plant, trapping the poem and its readers, across the centuries, in the purified domain of the cultural. The poem in question, of course, is Ronsard's ‘Mignonne, allons voir si la rose…’ (‘Beloved, let us go see if the rose…’), which first appeared in a sort of appendix to the 1553 edition of the poet's Amours, one of what the volume’s title refers to as ‘quelques Odes de L’auteur, non encor imprimées’ (‘a few odes by the author, not previously printed’). In these verses, the poet and his beloved head out to look at a rose that had been in full bloom that very morning, only to discover that its petals have fallen to the ground over the course of just one day. In the third stanza, the poet concludes by offering up a lesson not about the rose or about plant life, but about human mortality: ‘cueillés, vôtre jeunesse’ (‘gather the bloom of your youth’), a version of the carpe diem motif that is omnipresent in Ronsard's writings. The poem clearly is, as we have all been taught, about the passing of youth, about seizing the day, and about human joy and sadness—but need that necessarily lead us to ignore the rose as rose? Might we not ask: what of the plant itself?