In January 1944, while the world was at war, George Orwell wrote a defence of roses. “A correspondent reproaches me with being ‘negative’ and ‘always attacking things’. The fact is that we live in a time when causes for rejoicing are not numerous. But I like praising things, when there is anything to praise, and I would like here to write a few lines — they have to be retrospective, unfortunately — in praise of the Woolworth’s Rose.”
In 1936 Orwell had planted cheap roses from Woolworths. “One that I bought for a Dorothy Perkins turned out to be a beautiful little white rose with a yellow heart, one of the finest ramblers I have ever seen. A polyantha rose labelled yellow turned out to be deep red. Another, bought for an Albertine, was like an Albertine, but more double, and gave astonishing masses of blossom.” Then there was a little white rose, “no bigger than a boy’s catapult when I put it in”, which had since grown into “a huge vigorous bush”.
Orwell’s blossom did not go down well. A month later, as the Royal Air Force intensified its bombing campaign over Germany, Orwell reported that “last time I mentioned flowers in this column an indignant lady wrote in to say that flowers are bourgeois”.
Orwell’s Roses by the American essayist Rebecca Solnit is a rambling book. It is lovely and musing, if occasionally irritating. I read it while feeling low and found it a solace and a spur. If you know anyone who gets the winter blues, buy a copy for their Christmas stocking to see them through to spring.
In Orwell’s Nose: A Pathological Biography (2016) the critic John Sutherland gave us an Orwell sensitive to scents, a writer wrinkling his nostrils, often in disgust, at the olfactory assaults of cabbages and shag tobacco, horses’ oats and old rag mats. Solnit’s Orwell stops and smells the roses. He’s a pruner, a potterer, a taker of pleasure in every petal.
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On a trip to England a couple of years ago, on a book tour she would have liked to cancel, Solnit went to the village of Wallington in Hertfordshire, where in 1936 Orwell had planted roses in a cottage garden. “Startled by the roses”, Solnit started rereading Orwell. “One of the striking things,” Solnit writes, “was how much he recounted enjoyment, from many forms of the domestic comfort that might be called coziness to ribald postcards, the pleasures of 19th-century American children’s books, British writers like Dickens, ‘good bad books’, and a host of other things, and most of all animals, plants, flowers, natural landscapes, gardening, the countryside, pleasures that surface over and over again in his books all the way through Nineteen Eighty-Four’s lyrical evocation of the Golden Country and its light, trees, meadows, birdsong, and sense of freedom and release.”
This is an Orwell happy digging in the “Augean” mud of his garden, watching his marrows swell, admiring the markings of the common toad and delighting in those things like a blackbird’s song or a yellow elm tree in October that cost nothing “and do not have what the editors of left-wing newspapers call a class angle”.
The best bits of the book are about Orwell proper. At 308 pages, there’s a definite need for secateurs. “Cut right back,” as they say on Gardeners’ Question Time. There are straggling sections and tangential thorns.
There is a tendency, too, to virtue signal, which isn’t very Wigan Pier. When Solnit visits a Colombian rose farm where stiff and scentless flowers are processed for the American Valentine’s market, she writes of the 150 people working in the frigid air. “I felt like an intruder on their daily ordeal, and I was embarrassed to be with their bosses for how it implied that I approved of the system and aligned myself with its managers and was, with them, watching them in ways that could be intimidating and oppressive.”
Later: “Much of my own work in recent years has tried to call attention to inequality of voice — to how sexual and gender violence, as well as racism, have been perpetrated in part by silencing some voices, often by threat and violence but also by systematic devaluation, including portrayal of those voices as untrustworthy, unqualified to speak, and unworthy of being heard or even allowed into the places where voices determine how our lives shall be lived in what kind of world.” We get it. You’re a goodie. Back to the garden.
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Orwell, writing on good and bad acts, is subtler and funnier. Here he is on planting trees: “Even an apple tree is liable to live for about 100 years, so that the Cox I planted in 1936 may still be bearing fruit well into the 21st century. An oak or a beech may live for hundreds of years and be a pleasure to thousands or tens of thousands of people before it is finally sawn up into timber. I am not suggesting that one can discharge all one’s obligations towards society by means of a private re-afforestation scheme. Still, it might not be a bad idea, every time you commit an antisocial act, to make a note of it in your diary, and then, at the appropriate season, push an acorn into the ground.”
Orwell’s Roses by Rebecca Solnit, Granta, 308pp; £16.99
