Orwell's Roses

by Rebecca Solnit

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.

Michael Pollan wrote in The Botany of Desire, we think of these plants as something we domesticated, but it could be argued that they domesticated us to tend and propagate them.

The natural world is looking more and more collaborative and interdependent and less and less competitively individualistic.

She reminded me what my Black neighbors had taught me earlier that decade, that the yearning to be more rugged, more rustic, more rough, more scruffy, is often a white and a white-collar yearning, and that those who have only recently escaped agricultural work, maybe sharecropping or slavery or migrant labor, who have survived being treated as dirty or backward, are often glad to be polished and elegant. You have to feel securely high to want to go low, urban to yearn for the rural, smooth to desire roughness, anxious about artificiality to seek this version of authenticity. And if you see the countryside as a place of rest and respite you’re probably not a farmworker.

There might be virtuous ways to love nature, but the love of nature is no guarantor of virtue.

“Both the merchants and the members of Britain’s landed elite who were involved in the proliferation of country houses from the late 17th century (the latter to consolidate their status and the former to gain entry into that elite) increasingly utilised notions of gentility, sensibility and cultural refinement in part to distance themselves from their actual connections to the Atlantic slave economy.”

“The first thing that we demand of a wall is that it shall stand up,” Orwell wrote in his critique of the painter Salvador Dalí. “If it stands up, it is a good wall, and the question of what purpose it serves is separable from that. And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp.” Form cannot be separated from function. And the beauty—or the hideousness—can be in meaning, impact, implications, rather than appearance.

Once, the trees from which wood came, the fields from which grain came, the springs, river, well, or rain from which drinking water came would have been familiar; every object would appear out of somewhere, from someone or something known to the user, and producers and consumers would be the same people or people who knew one another. Industrialization, urbanization, and transnational markets created a world where water poured out of faucets, food and clothing appeared in stores, fuel (in our time if not in Orwell’s with the coal chutes and sooty air) was largely invisible, and the work that held all this together was often done by people who were themselves invisible. There were undeniable benefits—a more stimulating and various material and mental life—but they came at a cost.