Orwell's Roses

Incongruity—the frequent juxtaposition between life and death, of the horrific acts of war and the sustaining work of gardening—marks Orwell’s work. Additionally, incongruity becomes a hallmark of Solnit’s book itself. For example, she opens the book with an account of the Day of the Dead celebrations in San Francisco only to reveal that she “was on a morning train rolling north from King’s Cross in London” (3). The Day of the Dead festivities, in turn, celebrate the dead by offering them the so-called good things in life—food and drink, flowers, colorful art, and photographs—while revelers consume pastries decorated with skulls (symbolic of life consuming death, rather than the other way around). As Solnit describes the Day, “[I]t’s a time when the borders between life and death become porous” (3). From this imagined hinterland, Solnit begins her pursuit of George Orwell, a writer long deceased (he died in 1950) whose work, in contrast, remains freshly alive. In fact, her self-described “quest” is in some senses her own way of honoring this specific dead person: She wants to celebrate a different, but equally legitimate, version of Orwell, a writer famous for grim proclamations about the excesses of authority and the decline of political culture.

Instead, Solnit wants to examine Orwell’s connection to nature, a fascination she develops after learning that he once planted roses at his cottage in Wallington—right before going off to fight in the Spanish Civil War. This writer, who is remembered for his fierce commitment to the objective truth and to principled political causes, also celebrated beauty and reveled in the simple pleasures of nature. Solnit embarks on a quest to reconcile these two very different impressions of Orwell. She notes that her book shouldn’t be considered a biography of Orwell; while it wanders through many events of his life (though not in clear chronological order), it’s also concerned with roses, other flowers, and nature in general.

Her second chapter is devoted to an examination of roses—both as replicating symbols and as scientific plants. She admits that “[r]oses mean everything, which skates close to meaning nothing” (15), and then elucidates the many meanings to which the images of roses have been assigned. She notes how “ubiquitous” the images of roses are: “[T]hey’re literally wallpaper and are routinely depicted on everything from lingerie to tombstones” (15). In addition, the actual flowers “are used for courtships, weddings, funerals, birthdays, and a lot of other occasions, which is to say for joy, sorrow and loss, hope, victory, and pleasure” (15-16). They can also, as in the example of John Lewis’s funeral, “symbolize the blood shed” (16) during the civil rights struggle.

Often, Solnit notes, roses are feminized, and “phenomena that have been feminized are often dismissed as ornamental and inconsequential” (17). She repeatedly attempts to undermine this view, emphasizing the rose’s importance not only metaphorically, as a culturally-significant and shape-shifting symbol, but also as a plant and a commercial commodity. Here, she uses roses as a starting point to explain the importance of flowering plants in general: Scientifically speaking, without flowering plants, animal life—including human life—wouldn’t be possible. She writes, “[F]lowering plants were revolutionary in their appearance on the earth some two hundred million years or so ago, are dominant on land from the arctic to the tropics, and are crucial to our survival” (17).

Orwell lives a geographically peripatetic life, almost as far-reaching as the flowering plants Solnit describes. From his birth in India to a boarding school in England to imperial service in Burma (now Myanmar), Orwell’s early life was full of travel and exposure to various cultures. He later lived among the marginalized underclasses in Paris and in London before venturing to Spain to fight for a political cause he fervently believed in. Amid all this, he kept domestic diaries to recount his daily activities, and much of these writings detail his gardening habits. Solnit points out that few know the Orwell who planted roses alongside his trees. This fills her “with joyous exultation,” she claims (14).

He didn’t just sow practical plants, like fruit-bearing trees, but took the time to tend roses, which are considered a fundamentally ornamental plant. This, she insists, reveals something about “who he was and who we were and where pleasure and beauty and hours with no quantifiable practical result fit into the life of someone [...] who also cared about justice and truth and human rights and how to change the world” (14). Unlike previous conventional wisdom about gardening and frolicking in the countryside, Solnit insists that “[n]ature itself is immensely political, in how we imagine, interact with, and impact it” (29). While this was certainly true during Orwell’s lifetime, though not much acknowledged (as Solnit admits), it seems doubly so in an era of climate change and global commerce. Solnit thus introduces one of the book’s main themes: Politics and the Natural Landscape.

Solnit emphasizes Orwell’s poor health and the facts of the ephemeral writing life as primary reasons for Orwell’s gardens: In his declining health, he found solace in the cycle of life that gardening represents; the activity literally grounded him. Thus, despite the state of the world—or his health—Orwell planted gardens as markers of hope and continuity—as an embrace of death, which inevitably brings new life. Again, the juxtaposition is stark but clearly connected, just as in Orwell’s writing and his domestic life. Not so ironically then, Orwell’s legacy remains alive through not just his prescient writing but also the ornamental roses he planted back in 1936, which still bloom. Solnit is surprised into this revelation upon seeing those roses: “I was suddenly in his presence in a way I hadn’t expected, and I was in the presence of a living remnant of the essay [“A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray”], and they rearranged my old assumptions” (14). She continues to shed light on her discovery of this very different Orwell throughout the rest of the book.