HENRICHSEN, E.T. 2021. THE NAUVOO ROSE ON TEMPLE SQUARE. ARNOLDIA, 78(5-6): 8-9 
The Nauvoo Rose on Temple Square 
Esther Truitt Henrichsen 
Salt Lake City in a teapot,” my boss, 
Peter Lassig, told me. It was the spring 
of 1980, and we were standing in a quiet cor- 
ner of Temple Square, in the heart of Salt Lake 
City. Before us, a small, unglamorous rose was 
beginning to produce its small, deep-red flow- 
ers. Peter had asked me to transplant it to a 
historic home garden, two blocks away. The 
rose was growing within a collection of special 
plants protected by the warmth and shade of a 
fifteen-foot wall made of adobe and sandstone 
that surrounds the square. 
Peter explained that the rose came from a 
woman named Elizabeth Hubble. “She walked 
the thirteen hundred miles from Nauvoo,” he 
said, “but her rose rode in the wagon and was 
most likely the only luxury she allowed her- 
self.” Elizabeth was one of seventy thousand 
Latter-day Saints who made the trek across the 
plains along the Mormon Trail from 1847 to 
1869 before the railroad connected the West to 
the rest of the continent. Elizabeth was among 
those who were expelled from their homes in 
Nauvoo, a city they had built. She would have 
had little time to dig the plant from her gar- 
den, and she made a real commitment to keep 
it alive for the rest of her journey. She would 
have watered it from the Platte River in 
Nebraska, the Sweetwater River in Wyoming, 
and Emigration Creek as she traveled down into 
the Salt Lake Valley. 
As Peter told me about the storied rose that 
late spring afternoon, we were standing across 
from the south door of the Assembly Hall, a 
beautiful, Victorian Gothic building, completed 
in 1882, that was about to go through an exten- 
sive renovation—the reason it was necessary 
to move the rose. Temple Square is the most 
visited site in Utah, which is impressive for a 
state boasting five national parks. Its ten acres 
are dominated by the large, domed Taberna- 
cle and the Salt Lake Temple, divided by the 
Center Mall. With a cathedral of fabulous 
American and European elms (Ulmus ameri- 
{ { S he brought it from Nauvoo, Illinois, to 
cana and U. laevis) overhead, Temple Square 
has served as one of the great urban spaces in 
the United States for well over a hundred years. 
The perimeter wall was built as fortification 
when Salt Lake City was still wilderness and 
now provides a peaceful space amid the noise 
of growing urbanity. 
The next morning, I took a shovel and a pot 
to dig the little Nauvoo rose, becoming one 
more in a line of gardeners who had cared for 
the plant and its provenance since Elizabeth’s 
family had given it to Temple Square in the 
1880s. Peter had been introduced to the rose 
in 1953, when he was fifteen, by his boss Irvin 
Nelson. In turn, Irvin had been charged with 
caring for it by his predecessor, who had gar- 
dened at Temple Square since the late 1800s. 
This location was the second placement for the 
rose on Temple Square. I was taking it to its 
first new home in nearly a hundred years. 
Towering over the rose were three Japanese 
tree peonies (Paeonia suffruticosa) that were 
the most tree-like peonies I have ever seen. 
They had been a gift in the 1930s from Brown 
Floral, a family-run nursery that is still part of 
the horticultural fabric of Salt Lake City. Each 
plant had at least thirty mauve blooms, and 
they were dug and moved to the garden south 
of the Temple. Several other plant treasures in 
this space would also be transplanted. 
In the spirit of its century of being a reposi- 
tory of gift plants, this garden between the 
Assembly Hall and the Temple Square wall 
was where, six years later, I chose to plant the 
seven-son flower (Heptacodium miconioides). 
This plant was sent to subscribers of Arnoldia 
when the story of this newly introduced spe- 
cies was published in the Fall 1986 issue. That 
Heptacodium grew into a glorious tree that 
every few years bloomed at the same moment 
as the monarch butterfly migration from north 
to south. You could stroll past the tree and be 
amazed as hundreds of monarchs were startled 
into the air. It was cut down a few years ago by 
a gardener who had no knowledge of its history 
