When you think of George Orwell, you think of the more harrowing sides of humanity: the squashing of the human spirit, how absolute power corrupts absolutely. His name conjures the terrifying totalitarian states of his dystopian masterpieces 1984 and Animal Farm. Orwell has the rare honor of entering the English lexicon as “Orwellian,” an adjective meaning an oppressive state defined by propaganda, constant surveillance, and dangerous disinformation. Orwell arguably experienced one of the most tumultuous periods in human history. In his lifetime, he bore witness to the annihilation of 6 million Jews, the world’s deadliest war, the brutal rule of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin. Today he is best known as a political writer: a defender of democracy and a fierce fighter against the frightening forces of totalitarianism.
But his work isn’t just about the monstrous things humans are capable of.
Orwell might have written about nefarious dictators, Big Brother and atom bombs, but he also wrote about toads, lilacs, and hedgehogs. (As he wrote in his iconic essay “Why I Write,” “I am not able, and do not want, completely to abandon the world view that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.”)
Orwell was dedicated to pressing political causes but he was also a connoisseur of commonplace pleasures.
In her unconventional biography Orwell’s Roses, poet of politics Rebecca Solnit turns her meandering mind to this titan of 20th century literature—and makes us see him in a completely different light. Her lyrical book begins with a direct, declarative sentence:
“In the spring of 1936, a writer planted roses.”
Gertrude Stein once said “a rose is a rose is a rose.” But for the ever-curious Solnit, a rose is never just a rose—the fact that Orwell devoted himself to the life-affirming act of gardening when tyranny threatened to unworld the world had to mean something.
“This man most famous for his prescient scrutiny of totalitarianism and propaganda, for facing unpleasant facts, for a spare prose style and an unyielding political vision, had planted roses,” Solnit writes, “That a socialist or a utilitarian or any pragmatist or practical person might plant fruit trees is not surprising: they have tangible economic value and produce the necessary good that is food even if they produce more than that. But to plant a rose—or in the case of this garden he resuscitated in 1936, seven roses early on and more later—can mean so many things.”
For Solnit, a rose is a representation of frivolousness, of beauty without a practical purpose. A garden is the living embodiment of Oscar Wilde’s “all art is rather useless” (after all, can you be sustained by sweet briar roses or pretty pink tulips?).
But roses are still necessary, though they’re technically useless.
Roses remind us that even in times of unprecedented horror and carnage, life persists.
Roses remind us of nature’s—and our own—resilience.
Flowers are fragile but relentless. Their seeds germinate in the ground. Their buds burst. But their petals eventually fall, their leaves brown, their buds droop. Their decay supplies new soil for the next generation of flowers to bloom. The cycle of life ceaselessly continues.
A garden symbolizes the strength of the human spirit. Much like a garden which blossoms every spring no matter how bleak or brutal the winter, we’re tenacious. In 1941, after the Blitz on London, Orwell retreated to his quaint 16th century cottage in Wallington. There he found consolation among the hares and wallflowers—and the reassurance that the natural world carried on despite the folly of humans:
“At Wallington. Crocuses out everywhere, a few wallflowers budding, snowdrops just at their best. Couple of hares sitting about in the winter wheat and gazing at one another. Now and again in this war, at intervals of months, you get your nose above water for a few moments and notice that the world is still going around the sun.”
For Orwell, his garden was something he did for pure pleasure, a hobby, a passion. To some, such a hobby might seem indulgent, irrelevant, a pointless past time, a distracting diversion. But for him, roses were freedom. In this way, planting a rose (and other “trivial” things like painting a landscape, sewing a quilt, baking a seven layer cake, composing a symphony or a song) proves we’re human—not just cogs in a machine whose only purpose in life is to work 8 hours a day and accumulate wealth.
A garden suggests we can do things for glee—not to gain recognition or achieve some pragmatic goal. We can have fun without an agenda. We can step off the joyless grind of self-improvement. Our hobbies don’t have to be side hustles.
“Every artist…everyone who is truly alive, has the analogue of Orwell’s rose garden in their life,” Maria Popova notes, “For me, it is my cello. It is the forest. It is the Meyer lemon I grew from a seed, now thriving on my Brooklyn window sill.”
In a soul-stretching 2011 interview with Oprah, Toni Morrison beautifully articulates this idea, “I have a place that is mine. That’s my work when I write. It’s free. No one tells me what to do. It’s mine. It’s all mine.” Everyone—she goes on to argue—needs a place of their own: it can be a rose garden, it can be a leather-bound notebook. It just has to be a place where you’re beholden to nothing and no one.
Orwell’s Roses resembles an enchanting—if unruly—rose bush. As Guardian critic Gaby Hinsliff notes, Solnit’s biography belongs in a “whimsical category of its own, meandering elegantly enough through lots of subjects loosely connected to one or the other; more of a wildly overgrown essay…than a book.” Solnit’s far-reaching curiosity branches off in many directions and over the course of 272 pages, she considers several of the rose’s associations.
In one of my favorite chapters “We Fight for Roses Too,” she contemplates the significance of the rose in the suffrage movement. “Bread for All, and Roses Too” became a kind of credo for the movement after Helen Todd, a campaigner for women’s voting rights, came upon the phrase in 1910. Whereas bread denotes home and shelter and sustenance—the things we need to live—roses refer to music, poetry, art, film, nature, books, passion—the things we live for. As Solnit writes with understated elegance:
“It was a pretty slogan but a fierce argument that more than survival and bodily well-being were needed and were being demanded as a right. It was equally an argument against the idea that everything that human beings need can be reduced to quantifiable, tangible goods and conditions. Roses in these declarations stood for the way that human beings are complex, desires are irreducible, that what sustains us is often subtle and elusive.”
It is a distinctly liberal notion that we should renounce all joy in the name of the causes we believe in. You have to forgo all frivolous pleasures—the idea goes—if you want to be a “serious” activist.
Reading Orwell’s Roses reminded me of an incident between my friend Samantha and her college friend. On October 31, 2023, Samantha casually invited this friend to a Halloween party. “How can you ask me to a party at a time like this?!?!” she screamed via text, outraged by what I thought was an inoffensive invitation.
Why was she so upset?
According to her, it was “wrong” to party when Israel was committing genocide against the Palestinians.
Because Samantha was being “ignorant” and “insensitive,” this life long friend then blocked her on all social media platforms and never spoke to her again.
Underlining her actions was the misguided belief that to be a true activist, you have to join in other people’s suffering. If the people of Gaza were being brutally bombed, you certainly shouldn’t dance and drink punch at a Halloween party.
But politics and pleasure can coexist. In fact, pleasure, joy, delight, laughter are instruments of resistance—they fortify us for the fight against tyranny and oppression. For Orwell, his rose garden was a place of replenishment. Tending to flowers was a way for him to strengthen his citadel so he could wage war against his day’s demagogues and delusions.
[…] garden as a real and metaphoric paradise reminds me of Rebecca Solnit’s unconventional biography Orwell’s Roses. Both women are politically inclined. Both women have meandering minds that playfully frolic […]