Our family still remembers an ancestor who fought at the Battle of the Alma
in 1854.

On that day, Russians, British, and French soldiers stood facing one another
with weapons in their hands. Perhaps somewhere among the British ranks were the
ancestors of the people whose name would, a century later, become inseparable
from some of the world's most beautiful roses — the Austin family of
Shropshire.

We will never know.

But we like to think about how remarkably the world can change.

After the war, our ancestor returned home. He bought land, built a mill, and
grew grain. People needed harvests, not gunpowder.

In England, other men returned to their fields and gardens. Generation after
generation, the Austin family cultivated roses, until David Austin devoted his
life to creating flowers that would forever change the world of roses.

Nearly two centuries have passed.

Today, on our farm in Indiana, we grow David Austin roses. What was once
divided by war has been reunited through beauty.

History rarely moves in a straight line. Sometimes it follows a long path
from a battlefield to a field of roses.

There is a famous line from the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky: “Beauty
will save the world.”

We are not certain that beauty can save the whole world.

But we believe that every bouquet makes it a little better.

And we believe that a person who surrounds life with beauty is far less
likely to one day stand in the Thin Red Line.