The unfamiliar Orwell: the writer as passionate gardener

This is a book about George Orwell’s recognition that desire and joy can be forces of opposition to the authoritarian state and its intrusions. To explore the theme, Rebecca Solnit has produced a sequence of loosely linked essays around the roses and fruit bushes the author of Animal Farm planted in 1936 in the garden of his modest Hertfordshire house.

A Californian with more than 20 books behind her, Solnit opens this latest with a pilgrimage to Wallington, where Orwell’s Albertine roses have endured. The blooms instigate a reconsideration of the man ‘most famous for his prescient scrutiny of totalitarianism’, which in turn invites the author ‘to dig deeper’ and question ‘who he was and who we were and where pleasure and beauty… fit into the life… of anyone who also cared about justice and truth’.

Solnit proceeds to consider roses culturally and historically, for example in their use in medieval recipes; the history and function of gardens; the role of class and race, and much more. She also sets the Hertfordshire planting in the context of the 32-year-old Orwell’s life: he had just been north to research The Road to Wigan Pier, and was about to head to Spain to support the Republicans — ‘two journeys that would awaken him politically’.

Wigan leads Solnit to a chapter on coal and ‘the lurid misery on which Britain’s puissance was built’, and on ‘decades of fossil-fuel-sponsored climate denial’. She describes a 1946 Tribune essay in which Orwell mentions the planting as ‘a triumph of meandering’, and this phrase aptly sums up Orwell’s Roses. The most enjoyable sections among many for me were on Tina Modotti and Jamaica Kincaid. The first was the Italian-born photographer whose voluptuous 1924 image of roses printed on paper saturated with palladium, sold, as a contact print, for $165,000 — at the time the highest ever paid for a photograph.