Would you Change your Life for a Rose?

‘Roses have tantalized, seduced, and intoxicated more than any other flower,’ writes Diane Ackerman in A Natural History of the Senses. ‘They’ve captivated swains, homeowners, flower addicts, and sensuists since the ancients.’

My forthcoming historical nonfiction, To Africa for a Rose, is about a Western Australian family who began a new life in East Africa in 1925, partially on the basis of a rose like the one illustrated above.

It is named Old Blush, also known as Parsons’ Pink China. A foundational China rose of ancient origin,  it is generally accepted as the first East Asian rose cultivar to reach Europe in the eighteenth century. China roses revolutionised European gardens with their ability to bloom repeatedly throughout the summer and into late autumn. Old Blush is believed to be the inspiration for the 1805 poem Last Rose of Summer, which evokes nostalgia when friends have passed on.

Yet despite China roses’ reputation for resilience, they thrive best with rich, well-drained soil and consistent watering.

When I began writing To Africa for a Rose, the book did not then have a title, but it was clear that the family’s story pivoted on a particular moment. Imagine this scene in Tanganyika Territory (Tanzania today), East Africa: a vast expanse of thorn-bush covered grass plains where abundant wild animals roam and graze; in the distance, dust plumes spiral from Maasai warriors and their cattle on the move. The land is droughting as the seasonal rains have failed. Hidden among tangled bushes is an abandoned shack, its corrugated roof hanging off, its door and window frames rotting. Beside it is an abandoned garden – there, nestled in the tangle,  flourishes an Old Blush rose.

It is in this unlikely spot that the family about whom I write choose to make a new start after narrowly surviving Japan’s disastrous 1923 Great Kantō earthquake. The head of the family – Australian Gallipoli veteran Frank Anderson – discovers the rose: but it is not its silvery-pink beauty that captivates him as much as the agricultural potential it represents. That it survives, abandoned, in the midst of a drought, suggests good soil and a potential water source.

Meanwhile, Frank’s wife and daughter are in Western Australia, refugees after the Japanese earthquake. He sends them a sub-ocean cable to say he has ‘bought a farm’. When they arrive in Tanganyika to join him in August 1925, they find there is no farm… he has gambled their futures on the presence of the Old Blush rose on the parcel of wild land he has purchased. To survive there, they must build an agricultural venture from scratch.

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The actual rose Frank found had been planted before WW1 when Tanganyika was still known as German East Africa. An Afrikaner (Dutch South African) had been granted the land by the German government but instead of farming it, he left it wild, only creating a small garden and a shack as dwelling while he caught game to send to the Frankfurt Zoo. Frank recognised the rose’s potential because he had grown such flowers all his life, in Australia and Japan. Roses were so often the choice of settlers, as reminders of whence they came or as part of establishing an ordered life in wild country. Albany, Western Australia, where Frank’s wife, Honor was born, was and still is full of rose gardens.

In Orwell’s Roses, author Rebecca Solnit named one of the chapters Old Blush, describing the nostalgia roses evoke and the importance of the long-blooming China roses in Europe. The book’s back cover describes ‘Orwell as an avid gardener, whose political writing was grounded in his passion for the natural world.’ Solnit explains that, ‘in planting roses in the garden, Orwell was rooting himself in a particular soil, and also in ideas and traditions and lineages that whether he loathed them or not were his and were all around him.’

Historically, many different civilisations have attached meanings to roses, with their beauty, thorns and scent reappearing in art, literature, religion and politics for over two millennia. They have variously been a symbol of love, desire, tenacity, secrecy, war, bloodshed and politics, all of which occur in To Africa for a Rose, making the title also appropriate for symbolic reasons.

Talking of symbolism, I like this quote from Strong Roots: A Memoir of Food, Family and Ukraine by Olia Hercules, describing the process of propagating a rose:

… it is something you embark on with ‘faith, hope and luck’ … you do not know whether the roots will take; it all happens under cover of darkness, within the soil … A rough stick, within a month, with enough faith, hope and luck, will have roots anchoring it to the soil; then soon enough, tender arms with soft thorns dancing as they grow, then small buds swelling, unfurling, blooming and scenting the air.

To me, this evokes the family building the farm they had gambled on Old Blush; perhaps it is even an apt metaphor for the process of writing a book.

As a postscript, I should add that that rose also ultimately changed my life –I had to move to another country to research and write the book.