Every rose has its thorns, and the so-called Nauvoo rose soon returning to Salt Lake City’s Temple Square grounds has its own thorn—roots of an uncertain history.
In 1975, the Church News reported a tale of pioneer perseverance: Elizabeth Payne Hobbley is said to have arrived in the Salt Lake Valley in 1849, a beloved Nauvoo left in her wake and a teapot with a small rose plant carried in her arms.
Word-of-mouth accounts say the teapot rose plant stayed with the Hobbley family until it was given to Temple Square in the 1880s. The rose’s welfare wasn’t documented until the mid-20th century, when Temple Square Gardens supervisor Irvin T. Nelson took the legend of a redubbed “Elizabeth Hubble” to heart.
“I suspect that the [rose] cutting of the 1950s or 1960s was one given to Irvin T. Nelson by ‘a little old lady’ and that Nelson did indeed plant it in the rose garden near the Assembly Hall,” Church historian Emily Utt said.
Nelson told the legend of the teapot rose to his successor, Peter Lassig, who took care of the little multigenerational plant until the spring of 1980. By then, a young Esther Truitt Henrichsen was charged to move the rose from the Assembly Hall due to renovations.
Over the last four decades, the legend has fueled the rose’s survival. Despite the bush splitting in two, a fallen cobblestone wall and Temple Square’s latest renovations, Henrichsen’s dedication to the plant eventually spread to Brigham Young University–Idaho’s Department of Applied Plant Science.
Visit the Church News to read more about how Nauvoo roses will be replanted before the Salt Lake Temple Celebration next year.
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