Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit
Review of Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit
“The attack on truth and language makes the atrocities possible. If you can erase what has happened, silence the witnesses, convince people of the merit of supporting a lie, if you can terrorize people into silence, obedience, lies, if you can make the task of determining what is true so impossible or dangerous they stop trying, you can perpetuate your crimes.”
Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit (2021). Published by Viking.
This isn’t my first rodeo with Rebecca Solnit. When I had more time, one of my favorite things to do was to sit down and watch interviews of writers talking about their books, craft, and lives. An endless fascination of mine is the creative process that it takes to make pieces of art and writing, and that’s why I go to museums so much.
I spend a lot of time at each painting pondering the process of creating it, then take my journal and go and write about the experience. It’s the same process about literature, too. It feels like sacred ground to enter the mind of a writer or an artist, so it seems just right to do this.
Orwell’s Roses is the newest book by acclaimed author Rebecca Solnit. I’m an avid gardener when the warm season comes around, so I was immediately fascinated with the connection between Orwell and his gardening habits. I honestly had read nothing about Orwell and his garden before this, nor about gardening and writing as a source of inspiration and calm. And man, I’m glad I read this. Let’s dive right into it.
Writers, like George Orwell, have found solace in gardening as a form and source of creativity.
Rebecca Solnit really did her research when it came to this nonfiction collection of essays. It’s a combination of her research about George Orwell, which she traveled to where he formerly lived in England in order to see the glory of what he once grew himself. She did all this research about gardening, plants, and formed theories about what it could’ve meant to someone like Orwell, who was living at the brink of anxiety with World War II.
At the same time, she connects the past to the present she’s living inside of. The book was written during the era of COVID-19, which was a crisis on so many different levels. It exposed socioeconomic issues, as well as the underlying racial and political issues that were there this entire time. As women’s rights and minority rights were being infringed upon, Solnit had to look all of this in the eye when considering the distant past in which Orwell lived in.
Before we begin with Orwell’s garden, Solnit establishes us with his past. He served the country during its colonial empire period, and was stationed in Burma, which is now known as Myanmar. It was there Orwell began to grapple with the thoughts of police states and the impacts of incarceration and colonialism on individuals, as he was literally hired to help keep Burma under British control.
He then got involved with the Spanish Civil War in the late 1930s, which solidified some of the viewpoints he’d been forming up until this boiling point. Eight years later, he would come out with novels like 1984 and Animal Farm, which were radical perspectives to openly publish at those times, let alone admit to the world. And so he found solace in his estate in the countryside, where he grew a grand rose garden.
That’s the focus of this collection: how gardening offered a sense of peace in a world full of despair. Orwell, which many may not know, was a master at botany.
He knew so much about plants and how to grow them, and even when he was a child, he wrote constantly about nature in his journals. When he grew up and was quote-on-quote a real adult, he still wrote endlessly in his journals about the world around him and what he had observed.
I also enjoyed the nod to other famous writers that also gardened: Jamaica Kincaid was mentioned to be one of our fellow garden people, which is always nice to hear. I think this is a topic that can really touch people who are both writers and gardeners because it shows how a moment of peace, of stillness and connection with the Earth, can lead to something so creative and beautiful.
The connection of Orwell to something outside of war, liberation, and oppression was refreshing to read about. When someone thinks about Orwell, the first thought that comes to their mind is that he was someone who wrote these novels about governments and secrecy, but he offered so much faith in these little plants he was growing at that time.
While gardens and roses can be allegories for control and manipulation (e.g. the government victory garden, the current floral industry and its exploitation, the fact that Orwell’s ancestors owned plantations), they humanize him.
Overall Thoughts
It’s a lovely book, and a must-read if you’re into Orwell, gardening, or uncovering processes of creativity. I picked it up truly by chance and I’m glad I was graced with what this book had to say. It connects the past and present in a way that was full of devotion, but also careful in what it dissects.
Now I don’t know much about Orwell outside of this, and I surely am no buff about his life and history, but I thought that connecting it to broader issues with the garden as the anchor was quite brilliant. All in all, this is two thumbs up from me. It was well-written, well-researched, and quite captivating.
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