Do we have any English born here? Let me tell you of an unfortunate rose which had a name change. Elina. HT bred by Dickson UK in 1984. In the United Kingdom it carried the rather unfortunate name of Peadouce, a brand of babies nappies.
Henri Martin. A Moss rose by the nurseryman Laffay of France. Not many of you would recognize the name “Henri Martin” but all of you would recognize a symbolic statue he was instrumental in having built. He was a Frenchman born in St Quentin, in 1810. A Mason and socialist, he started his life as a novelist. He is best remembered for his monumental Historie de France in 19 volumes. He also became, later in his life, deputy and senator for Paris. In the summer of 1865 he gathered with a group of other Masons and with a young artist named Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi at the home of the then famous author Edouard Rene de Laboulaye. At his meeting de Laboulaye proposed the idea of the Statue of Liberty, a gift from France to America. But the proposal lay dormant during the end of the reign of Napoleon III and the Franco-Prussian war. Bartholdi visited America and made arrangements for the presentation of the monument on the 4th July 1876, the centenary of the Declaration of Independence. Henri Martin was in charge of collecting money for the statue. Meanwhile in the USA, Joseph Pulitzer was collecting money for the pedestal. With the funds running low and the technical challenges the enormous statue presented, this vision was only realized in 1886. This was three years after Henri Martin’s death.
