Remembrance is a very special rose. As its solemn name suggests, it's a flower for remembering the past, a rose whose blood-red color is a deliberate reminder of the sacrifice of British Empire soldiers killed in the two world wars. Remembrance doesn't brighten up landscape gardens, it embellishes Commonwealth war cemeteries. From a distance, and not by chance, it looks like a poppy, the only flower that managed to grow on the edge of the trenches in 1914-18. Up close, the rose reveals all its beauty and delicate fragrance. Standing between the graves of the Great War veterans buried at the Thiepval Memorial in the Somme, it watches over them, braving the cold and eerie fog of autumn in this northern region. It's on this former battlefield that David Moody, the site's head gardener, introduced us to the rose, his fingers carefully slipping beneath the corolla.

The strapping 54-year-old is no ordinary horticulturist. His professional life has been devoted to the dead since he was recruited in 2007 by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC). "By preserving a natural environment worthy of these young soldiers, who sometimes came from the ends of the earth to fight on our soil, I feel I'm giving meaning to my job," he confided, plucking a few dead leaves from a bed of asters planted along a driveway. Remembrance, the French-British man told us, was created at the commission's request by the prestigious English firm Harkness, a favorite supplier of Queen Victoria. "This attention to detail is something of a trademark for us," he added, wearing, like the other gardeners around him, a black fleece embossed with the white logo of his institution.

Despite its global reach, the organization remains little known. The successor to the Imperial War Graves Commission, founded in 1917 by royal charter, the organization's patron is His Majesty King Charles III, with Princess Anne as president. Its mission is precise: to honor in perpetuity the memory of the 1.7 million men and women of the Commonwealth forces who fell in the two world wars in Europe, but also in other countries including Egypt, Kenya, Malaysia, Iraq, Libya and Gaza. In all, it manages 23,000 cemeteries in 153 countries and territories, an impressive funerary atlas. No soldier or nurse is forgotten. Any body that is found is buried as close as possible to the battlefield. And in the absence of identifiable bones, the name of the deceased is inscribed on the wall of a memorial.

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