Orwell's Roses by Rebecca Solnit, reviewed by Rosemary Goring

Granta, £16.99

Review by Rosemary Goring

In answer to an author questionnaire, in 1940, George Orwell wrote: “Outside my work the thing I care most about is gardening, especially vegetable gardening.” There have been countless books about Orwell, one of the most esteemed of last century’s British writers, but the American memoirist, Rebecca Solnit, has taken this under-emphasised aspect of his life to spin a new angle on his personality, work and outlook. It is a timely and original reappraisal, adding an extra dimension to a figure renowned for his political acuity who, it emerges, was equally interested in flowers.

As with her previous works, Solnit is part of the story. She writes that Homage to Catalonia, Orwell’s account of his involvement in the Spanish Civil War, shaped her book Savage Dreams: “He had been one of my principal literary influences, but I had not gotten to know more about him than what he revealed in the books and whatever set of assumptions was ambient.” That’s a sentence Orwell would have been incapable of writing.

Following serious illness, and under instructions from her doctor to rest, Solnit left California to visit Orwell’s cottage in the Hertfordshire village of Wallington. This was where he and his first wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy began married life in 1936. When Solnit visited, a few of the roses he planted were still flourishing.

In this rustic setting Orwell experimented with flowers and vegetables, hens and goats, while also turning the front room into a village shop. The reality of this romantic bolthole was far from dreamy. Guests found the place so cold, even in June, that weekends were an endurance test. In one of his domestic essays, Orwell commented on the pleasures of May, which included “not wearing underclothes”. Many who visited might have been grateful for his cast-offs.

Solnit has strong opinions on the significance of gardening and husbandry in Orwell’s life: “A garden offers the opposite of the disembodied uncertainties of writing … 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, the rules of physics, meteorology, hydrology, and biology, and the realms of the senses.” Among much else, Orwell’s Roses is an exercise – not entirely successful – in fathoming why people grow attached to the land.

Barnhill on Jura, where George Orwell wrote and also gardened

Weaving Orwell’s biography sketchily throughout, Solnit is more at ease in the realm of ideas than of gardens. Here, she feels on shaky ground. She does not think like a gardener, nor seem to appreciate its meaning for those who immerse themselves in their own patch of the great outdoors. In Wallington, and later on his sprawling acres on Jura, Orwell kept a detailed diary, noting the progress of his vegetables and fruit trees, how the daffodils were flowering, the number of eggs he had collected, how the goats were faring, and so on. Solnit seems puzzled by this, especially when he asked his wife or sister to keep up the diary when he was absent: “It’s not clear why he kept these detailed records …”.

Yet this is often what gardeners do, noting what works, when best to plant, or prune, or harvest. Not every diary Orwell kept, not every line he wrote, had a profound political or intellectual purpose. The enormous importance of gardening, to him, might be best summed up in a line from his essay on Mahatma Gandhi: “Our job is to make life worth living on this earth, which is the only earth we have.” The soil, and the wildlife it nurtured, were for him a source of tangible joy and contentment.

Solnit’s version of Orwell’s life is not intended as a full-scale biography. Instead, its aspirations lie in the author letting her mind roam freely on the connections between Orwell’s love of nature and its beauty and his political ideas, between the meaning of cultivating the land in our time, as well as his. In some ways the link is simple and obvious. In Why I Write, one of his best-known and most frequently quoted essays, he wrote: “I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience.”

At one point Solnit describes Orwell’s essay, A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray, as “a triumph of meandering”. Orwell’s Roses is equally discursive, leaping from Orwell to the Mexican photographer of roses Tina Modotti, or Stalin’s insistence on growing lemons out of season in icy Moscow. Some of her literary digressions cover well-trodden ground, such as the erotic photography of Robert Mapplethorpe. Most of them suggest a butterfly-catcher swiping the air, hoping to net something memorable.

The urge to wring as much meaning as possible from her material might explain rather too many laboured passages, such as her description of Orwell’s declining health: “You could say that the tuberculosis bacteria had made a garden of his lungs and were flourishing there, feeding on him as though the soft tissue of his lungs was fertile topsoil.”

Compared to the clarity and elegance of her last book, Recollections of My Non-Existence, Orwell’s Roses is heavy-footed, quixotic and uneven. Yet despite its flaws it has one great strength. Recognising the importance of gardening to Orwell’s soul and imagination prompted Solnit to return to his novels with fresh eyes. The result was to discover hidden depths: “If you dig into Orwell’s work, you find a lot of sentences about flowers and pleasures and the natural world … These sentences are less ringing, less prophetic than the political analysis, but they are not unrelated to it, and they have their own poetics, their own power, and their own politics.”

Orwell never lost sight of what gardening can achieve, compared to writing, politics, or almost any other endeavour. Often, he was prophetic. As COP26 turns minds to the future, few of his ideas appear more prescient than his injunction on how best to make a mark: “the planting of a tree, specially one of the long-living hardwood trees, is a gift which you can make to posterity at almost no cost and with almost no trouble, and if the tree takes root it will far outlive the visible effect of any of your other actions, good or evil.”