Digging in George Orwell’s garden

As she put it in a recent interview, the book is not only about how the roses gave her new ways of thinking about Orwell. It’s also about how they gave her new ways of thinking about pleasure and the natural world.

The first stop on her voyages of discovery was to re-connect with the Orwell essay in which he mentions the roses. This leads to a reconsideration of his other work and the issues that surround it. Orwell’s Roses also explores facets of the writer’s life at various stages, from the Wallington cottage to his final abode on the Scottish island of Jura where he composed the work he’s best known for.

Solnit unearths a writer “whose other perspectives seem to counterbalance his cold eye on political monstrosity”. As he himself said in 1940: “Outside my work the thing I care most about is gardening, especially vegetable gardening.”

Gardening, Solnit feels, is the opposite of the “disembodied uncertainties” of writing. It’s vividly sensorial, involves bodily labour, and provides an opportunity to see tangible results. This, then, is a way to step out of a whirlpool of words. “In an age of lies and illusions, the garden is one way to ground yourself in the realm of the processes of growth and the passage of time…”

Thus, Orwell’s horticultural successes and failures, his advocacy of tree-planting, and his love of small, satisfying pastimes such as reading detective fiction and well-made cups of tea sit alongside the work of the public figure who warned against totalitarianism and emphasised the accurate use of language.

Solnit is clear-eyed about Orwell: he is one of her primary literary influences, but she doesn’t ignore his prejudices, including the “slights and sneers” in some of his early work. However, “though he wasn’t exemplary in some respects, in others he was courageous and committed”.

She uncovers passages in his fiction and essays that deal with the natural world and other everyday pleasures through which “the grey portrait turns to colour”, even in his vision of dystopia. What strikes her in a renewed reading of Nineteen Eighty-Four is how much lushness and beauty it contains.

Following the trail of Orwell’s roses was a meandering process, Solnit writes, and the structure of her book mirrors this. The word she employs is rhizomatic, which initially referred to plants such as strawberries that send out roots in many directions.

It was then used by philosophers Deleuze and Guattari to describe a decentralized model of knowledge: “Any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be.” In this way, Solnit connects non-linear points to create a grid of roses, war, peace, art, colonialism and totalitarianism in Orwell’s time and in ours.

She also digs into the seedbed of what roses mean to the Western world. Even as ornaments and motifs, they represent life itself, “fertility, mortality, transience, extravagance, and as such they enter our art, rites, and language”.

This has its unsavoury side. Solnit visits a greenhouse in Bogota to find a larger truth about roses as nodes in a network of exploitation. Colombia has a vast flower industry, raising 80 percent of the roses sold in the United States, along with many other kinds of flowers for export.

In these “invisible factories of visible pleasure,” she sees the blemish behind the bloom. Orwell had written of the fuel he burned at home that “it is only very rarely, when I make a definite mental effort, that I connect this coal with that far-off labour in the mines,” and Solnit writes that “it was even more rarely that anyone connected the roses to the toil in these greenhouses”. No rose without a thorn, as the proverb puts it.

Elsewhere, she takes as a starting point a large painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds that features figures against a tranquil landscape, among them Charles Blair, Orwell’s great-great-grandfather. Blair’s marriage to the daughter of the Earl of Westmoreland was possible in no small measure because of revenue from a sugar plantation in Jamaica dependent on the blood and sweat of enslaved Africans.

Following Edward Said’s comments on Austen’s Mansfield Park, Solnit points out that “the elegance of the men and their temperate-zone landscape of leisure is underwritten by labour in a brutal industry in the tropics”. Though Blair’s descendants lost the Jamaica fortune, partly because slavery was abolished in 1833, the effects of such activities significantly shaped the society and lives of so many who came after.

As a part of the Indian Civil Service, Orwell’s father himself oversaw the production of opium, a process that impoverished and brutalised many Indian peasants. In Garry Littman’s words: “England’s national flower is the red Tudor rose. But the prickly truth is that the English owe much of their wealth to another blood-red flower, the poppy.”

Solnit also contrasts Orwell’s stint in Spain during that country’s remorseless civil war with the chequered life of radical activist Tina Modotti – whose photographs of roses became much sought-after. In another exploration, Stalin’s obsession with pushing lemon trees beyond natural limits gives rise to the observation that “the wheat fields around Wallington were reminders that even seeds for annuals or practices like farming could outlast a regime, a dictator, a pack of lies, and a war against science”.

In her acknowledgements at the end of the book, Solnit writes that she was unable to visit Motihari in Bihar, Orwell’s birthplace (possibly because of the pandemic). Had she done so, she could perhaps have created another connection, to the rose worn by Nehru on his achkan, using Orwell’s essay on Gandhi as a springboard. Pure speculation, of course.

Orwell’s Roses is essayistic in the best sense of the word, inviting the reader to walk down unexplored trails and find unmapped junctions. It’s also a graceful and eloquent appeal to pay attention, make art, and realise that present moments of pleasure can hold as much value as working towards future utopias.

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