Would you change your life for a flower?

What does this picture suggest to you – a lady’s brooch perhaps? A scarf clasp? Its actual size is 20mm in diameter. It is a carved ivory and painted copy of a cornflower, dating from the 19th century. Would it surprise you to learn that it was, in fact, worn by a man?

And could you have guessed that it also symbolizes an era when people might make decisions about where to start new lives based on information imparted by flowers?

In fact, this item belonged to Albert Young Hassell, one of Western Australia’s most prominent 19th century pioneers. He wore it in his lapel buttonhole, replacing it with a freshly picked cornflower when in season. The colour apparently matched his eyes, which I imagine as points of striking blue brightness set against what I know from monochrome photographs to be his balding head, fashionably huge moustache and genial face above the neutral colours of a Victorian gentleman’s outfit.

He may have worn the flower for its beauty and for its hue, but ultimately he knew, as did the Aboriginal people with whom he worked alongside, that survival depended upon an intimate knowledge of the land. His father, John Hassell, arrived in Western Australia in 1840, selecting land near the then tiny south-west settlement of Albany in part because of the incredible local wildflower diversity, which spoke to him of sheep grazing potential.

Yet as John Hassell searched for land for his sheep, he discovered areas of poisonous vegetation, learning that appearances can be deceptive. Eventually he established the well-known sheep stations of Kendenup and Jarramongup as well as smaller outstations. His second son, Albert Young Hassell, worked on the stations from the age of eleven, becoming an authority on flowers and what they told him about the nature of soil and rainfall. The Hakea victoria, for example, with the stunning rainbow colours of it lantern-like flowers, flourishes best on poor soil. The unsuspecting might assume only rich soil could produce such a spectacle.

In 1887, a government botanist assigned the name Chorilaena hassellii (now Muiriantha hassellii) in Albert’s honour for having collected specimens from the Stirling Range.

There is, of course, a much wider context to all this. In today’s era when people can make millions sitting behind a computer if they have the nouse (or luck), for some it is now perhaps hard to imagine the limited options of the past when land was still the key source of wealth. As land-owning opportunities opened up within Britain’s expanding Empire, this led to people studying plants and collecting specimens from around the world. In the mid-18th century, Kew Gardens was founded in London as a repository to preserve specimens. A century later, Charles Darwin, known for Origin of the Species (1859) extensively studied plants and flowers as part of his research process. Another important plant collector supplying botanists in England was Georgiana Malloy who worked from the 1830s in Western Australia.

Botanical adventurers even faced sometimes fatal dangers to paint, collect or smuggle home specimens. Nor was this all about understanding nature so as to exploit and benefit from land overseas. As the 19th century process of ugly industrialization grew more prevalent in Britain, it spawned an appreciation of nature’s beauty and concern for its loss. Artists like Beatrix Potter captured beauty ‘at home’ in England, while women like Marianne North or Ellis Rowan pushed the boundaries of ‘respectability’ by travelling unaccompanied to far-flung parts to paint the local flora.

Returning to the subject of this post, the Hassell family. It is one thing to collect specimens and return home – but quite another to start a completely new life in a wild place where reading the land was vital. I was struck, however, when learning about the Hassells, that for them, flowers were not just a potential means to a profitable end but something to be loved for their beauty. Another thing that struck me was how flowers were often grown by colonials, including the Hassells themselves, as reminders of ‘home’. Roses, in particular, were a flower often planted in the colonies as a link to a more ordered world from whence colonials came.

And so the concept repeated itself – with the protagonists of my current project. 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.

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I ask again, 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.  While you might think I would make a rose a symbol for this website, in fact I chose this blue cornflower lapel pin. A story has to start somewhere, and that was the point I chose.