He called them all English roses and gave them English names drawn from literature, society, and history, including Ancient Mariner, the Wife of Bath, Thomas à Becket, and Emily Brontë, along with those of various aristocrats, horticulturalists, and Shakespeare characters from Falstaff to Perdita, and the Brooklyn-born pharmaceutical opioids profiteer Mortimer Sackler. It could be said on the one hand that Sackler would be better represented by a poppy, and on the other that peddling opiates was at the heart of the British Empire (and was Orwell’s father’s life work).
