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I had grown up in a rolling California landscape studded with several kinds of oak trees along with bays and buckeyes.
If war has an opposite, gardens might sometimes be it, and people have found a particular kind of peace in forests, meadows, parks, and gardens.
trees planted in San Francisco by Mary Ellen Pleasant, a Black woman born in slavery around 1812, who had become a heroine of the Underground Railroad and a civil rights activist, as well as a player in the elite money politics of San Francisco.
April 26, 1946, is titled “A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray,” and
His life was shot through with wars.
Homage to Catalonia, his firsthand account of the Spanish Civil War, in my twenties. That latter book had been a major influence on my second book, Savage Dreams, for its example of honesty about the shortcomings of one’s own side and loyalty to it anyway and of how to incorporate into a political narrative personal experience all the way down to doubts and discomforts—that is, how to make room for the small and subjective inside something big and historic. He had been one of my principal literary influences,
“Truths and roses have thorns about them,” says the old aphorism, and Marianne Moore’s poem “Roses Only,” which, like a surprising amount of poetry, is addressed directly to the rose, ends with the remark “Your thorns are the best part of you.”
There’s a cultural view in which flowers are dainty, trivial, dispensable—and a scientific one in which flowering plants were revolutionary in their appearance on the earth some two hundred million years or so ago, are dominant on land from the arctic to the tropics, and are crucial to our survival. “How Flowering Plants Conquered the World” is the way a recent scientific article put it.
The poet-paleontologist Loren Eiseley argued more than half a century ago that flowering plants were crucial props and prods to the evolution of mammals and birds,
“Swing was really a dance to drive out demons.”
This unfamiliar Orwell also brings to mind a famous Buddhist parable about a person chased by a tiger who, in flight, stumbles over a cliff and grasps a small plant to prevent falling to her death. It’s a strawberry plant that is gradually becoming uprooted and will soon give way, and it has one beautifully ripe strawberry dangling from it. What, asks the parable, is the right thing to do at that moment, and the answer is to savor the berry. It’s a story suggesting that we are always mortal and might die sooner than we think: there are often tigers, there are sometimes strawberries.
It began with bronchitis contracted as a toddler that seems to have caused bronchiectasis—a condition of damaged airways that made him more susceptible to subsequent pulmonary infection. He came down with pneumonia and bronchitis repeatedly, as a child and as an adult. He was often sick enough to require hospitalization and weeks to months of convalescence.
He had several extended stays in hospitals and sanatoriums before his last decline institutionalized him for the year before his death of TB at forty-six in January 1950.
A friend said, “He was a rebel against his own biological condition and he was a rebel against social conditions; the two were very closely linked together.”
He managed to both love Englishness and loathe the British Empire and imperialism and to say a lot about both, to be an advocate for underdogs and outsiders, and to defend human rights and freedoms in ways that still matter.
1939 novel Coming Up for Air
1946 essay “Why I Write,” Orwell
As a poor man with few options for intimacy, he often relied upon parks and the rural outdoors as locations for sexual activity, a practice reflected in his novels Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Nineteen Eighty-Four, and that may have charged the natural world with another layer of allure.
he was neither a talented poet nor a promising novelist, and it would take time for him (and others) to find out that he was a sublimely gifted essayist.
(There’s a whole history to be written about bohemian aunts and queer uncles, about those family members who swoop down to encourage misfit children in ways their parents won’t or can’t.)
yes!
Eric Blair (who would assume the name George Orwell in 1933),
When Orwell returned to Wallington from the Spanish Civil War, where he enlisted at the end of 1936—and from a series of places where he thereafter convalesced from his war wound and another round of lung trouble—he recorded the daily egg production and the behavior of the individual birds and the minutiae of feeding and tending them.
A garden offers the opposite of the disembodied uncertainties of writing.
The Zen practitioner and gardener Wendy Johnson writes, “Watching the things of the world come apart and recombine is core Zen work and the fundamental anchorage of every gardener’s life.”
it was clear to at least some of the miners and engineers that they were excavating an ancient world to burn up in the present one.
Think of the Carboniferous as a sixty-million-year inhale by plants, sucking carbon dioxide from the sky, and the last two hundred years as a monstrous human-engineered exhale, undoing what the plants did so long ago.
To garden is to make whole again what has been shattered: the relationships in which you are both producer and consumer, in which you reap the bounty of the earth directly, in which you understand fully how something came into being.
“Bread for All, and Roses Too” said the pillow Todd delivered. In her magazine report, she reflected on the phrase that was to become a refrain for the suffrage movement, the labor movement, and then for radicals of the 1970s and after,
Bread fed the body, roses fed something subtler: not just hearts, but imaginations, psyches, senses, identities. 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.
The argument that all art must exhort us overlooks the needs and desires of those who are already engaged, and what fuels them, and what the larger work of building a society concerned with justice and compassion might be. What I found memorable in Weschler’s essay was the idea that it’s not necessarily the representation of injustice or suffering that might encourage someone to engage or help someone like the judge sustain that engagement. Art that is not about the politics of this very moment may reinforce a sense of self and society, of values and commitments, or even a capacity to pay
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In “Why I Write,” Orwell declared that he did so “because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. But I could not do the work of writing a book, or even a long magazine article, if it were not also an aesthetic experience.” Even when the agenda is bread, what spills over is roses.
Orwell was never an enthusiast for the factory, the machine, or the city, and in important ways he was not a modernist.
(In 1938, he and Eileen named their dog Marx “to remind us that we have never read Marx,” Eileen wrote to a friend, adding “now we have read a little and taken so strong a personal dislike to the man that we can’t look the dog in the face.”)
there’s a sentimental image of the muse as a pretty lady who’s the object of the writer’s ardor.
Stalin was surely Orwell’s principal muse,
Stalin was intent not just on liquidating his potential rivals, especially Trotskyists, so that he could rule unchecked but on destroying them and their credibility in ways that terrified everyone else into silence and deference. As Orwell would convey more powerfully than almost anyone before or since, one of the powers tyrants hold is to destroy and distort the truth and force others to submit to what they know is untrue.
Books were banned, facts were banned, poets were banned, ideas were banned. It was an empire of lies. The lies—the assault on language—were the necessary foundation for all the other assaults.
gardens are one way that culture does nature.
The Scottish artist and garden maker Ian Hamilton Finlay once wrote, “Certain gardens are described as retreats when they are really attacks.”
Defining the social order as natural and the aristocracy as rooted in the natural world justified the British aristocracy as they expanded their power and wealth even as the French decapitated and drove out their aristocracy after the 1789 revolution. The idea of nature as a touchstone of all that is true and good has lasted into our time.
The German playwright Bertolt Brecht famously wrote in a 1939 poem, Ah, what times are these, when a conversation about the trees is almost a crime For it encompasses silence about so many injustices.
Latina muralist Juana Alicia, a legendary figure in the San Francisco Bay Area
she had been crop-dusted with pesticides while picking lettuce while pregnant, and that all the agrarian landscape images I showed reminded her of that.
for me whose Irish Catholic and Eastern European Jewish ancestors passed along no heirlooms and were largely barred from public life and whose records fade out after a few generations—stir
the Reagans were in the White House modeling their own versions of upscale elitism for the few and dismantling the safety nets for the many.
But paradise is a walled garden, defined in part by what it shut out.
David Austin, the famous rose breeder who died in 2018 after six decades of producing roses that had both the fragrance and old forms of earlier roses with the repeat flowerings of floribunda and hybrid tea roses.
Her sentences twist, spiral, cover ground, mounting up into complex arguments about flowers, gardens, nature, racism, colonialism, and rage.
“Almost as if ashamed of the revulsion and hostility they have for foreign people, the English make up for it by loving and embracing foreign plants wholesale”
jamaica kinkaid
In her 1990 novel, Lucy, the
kinkaid---for black natures?
