Flower power
Ursula Buchan
The rose has long been an international symbol of peace and reconciliation. A striking example is ‘Peace’, which was bred by Meilland in the south of France, smuggled out to the United States during the last war, and became the first rose to be named after the war ended. Another is the Rose Garden in the ‘Park of Peace and Friendship’, close to the site of the completely razed village of Lidice, a mining village in the present-day Czech Republic. This park, dedicated in 1955, is a memorial to one of the worst Nazi atrocities of the second world war when, in June 1942, the village men were shot, their womenfolk sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp, and most of their children dispatched to Chelmno, where they were gassed.
As most people know, the massacre was carried out as a reprisal for the killing of Reinhard Heydrich, ‘the Butcher of Prague’, by two Czech agents. Interestingly, the idea for the Rose Garden came originally from the English ‘Lidice shall live’ Committee, chaired by Dr (later Sir) Barnett Stross, MP, which also raised £37,000 to help rebuild Lidice close to the old site. The rest of the world piled in and nearly 30,000 roses were donated to the Park by 35 different countries. Seven thousand of these came from Harry Wheatcroft’s nursery in Nottinghamshire, from where the British effort was co-ordinated. ‘Peace’ figured prominently among them. (Harry Wheatcroft, as older readers will remember, was a flamboyant, bewhiskered rosarian, a lifelong socialist and pacifist, much given to wearing loud suits.) A song, entitled ‘A Rose for Lidice’, was composed by Alan Rawsthorne soon after.
The English connections don’t end with Stross or Wheatcroft, however, for the exiled president of Czechoslovakia, Eduard Benes, and his wife spent the war in leafiest Buckinghamshire. They lived at The Abbey, a country house in the picturesque village of Aston Abbotts, near Aylesbury. Churchill would come over to visit from nearby Chequers, and much of the Czech resistance was organised from here, including the fateful planning for the assassination of Heydrich. In October 1943, to mark the 25th anniversary of the birth of an independent Czechoslovakia (the German invasion notwithstanding), Benes planted a lime tree in the grounds of The Abbey. Limes, being long-lived and stately, are commonly planted in eastern Europe to mark important anniversaries.
It is a fine, 40ft-tall specimen of the European lime (Tilia x. europaea). I viewed it from a nearby grassy field, where once stood the mediaeval village, now only bumps and hollows in the ground. The tree was pointed out to me by Victor Scott, a naturalist and retired professional gardener, who has lived and worked in Aston Abbotts all his life, and who knew the Benes’ during the war. As a schoolboy, he learnt some Czech so that he could greet them in their own language and, after they left for home in February 1945, Mrs Benes sent Victor a book about her country, signed by her husband. The next year, while on a tour of Europe, Victor knocked on the door of the presidential palace in Prague and was invited in for dinner.
It is a source of great satisfaction to him that the Czech links with Aston Abbotts remain strong and, in particular, since he is a gardener, that flowers are an essential symbol of that. In late April this year, during a long weekend of Anglo–Czech celebrations in Aston to mark the wartime associations as well as the 60th anniversary of VE Day, the Czech Ambassador planted a European lime tree on the village green and yellow roses in the churchyard. These were sent from Lidice, propagated from roses growing in the Park of Peace and Friendship. Victor recalls that Wheatcroft named a red Hybrid Tea rose ‘Lidice’, but it was never in commerce and, sadly, it seems to have died out.
It is easy to forget, if you are deeply immersed in gardening matters, as I am, just how important flowers and gardens are in a much broader context, both as symbols and for articulating deep feeling. One only has to consider, for example, poppy wreaths on Remembrance Sunday, white lilies at Easter, and the Commonwealth War Graves cemeteries, which are all gardens of remembrance. We instinctively think of gardens as good, since they are necessarily antithetical to war, strife, bitterness and corruption, while flowers are signs of fresh, unsullied, young life. It is salutary consciously to remember that from time to time.
And it is also salutary, if rather disturbing, to reflect that, if Hitler had won the war, a village which had given refuge to the Czech president-in-exile might very well now, like the original Lidice and the mediaeval village of Aston, be only bumps and hollows in the ground.
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