Would you change your life for a flower?

Would you change your life for a flower? I did – in a way. The Hassell/Anderson legacy of adventure staked on ‘Old Blush’ inadvertently changed my life. It became my mission to write about Frank and Honor Anderson’s lives, a project that involved leaving my home country to live abroad to complete To Africa for a Rose. 

In 1917, Albert Young Hassell’s youngest daughter, Honor, married Frank Anderson, a landless, penniless Gallipoli-wounded veteran. Seeking a fresh start in 1925 (and that is another story as to why), Frank risked their futures on a rosebush of ancient Chinese origin – ‘Old Blush’ – that he discovered flowering improbably in a wild part of East Africa.

Frank, born in 1893, had grown roses all his life, for the love of their beauty. But he knew they needed rich, well-drained soil. On this slender evidence of agricultural potential, he asked Honor and their seven-year-old child, Patricia to leave Western Australia and join him in establishing a farm in wild bush, miles from medical help, their only ‘neighbours’ the nomadic, warring Maasai people and the plentiful wild animals that graced the plains at that time, near the Serengeti in what is now Tanzania. Throughout the family’s time in East Africa, ‘Old Blush’ flourished near their house, but as one of a range of further roses planted and nurtured there.