Orwell's Roses

by Rebecca Solnit

The beauty of flowers is not merely visual; it’s metaphysical, and tactile, and with many of them olfactory: they can be smelled and touched and sometimes tasted. Some lead to fruit or seeds or other bounty humans value or even depend upon, so a flower is also a promise. You look at a flower at one stage and know that other stages came before and will come after. The beauty of roses may also lie in the way they are appealing at every phase from bud to dried and dead, and that their fading is slow and graceful. Camelias in full bloom have a form close to roses, but they go briskly from hard bud to wide-open flower to a brown sodden mess that drops from the stem to rot on the ground, and a lot of other flowers also decline this way. “Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds,” but roses rarely fester.

The beauty of flowers is not merely visual; it’s metaphysical, and tactile, and with many of them olfactory: they can be smelled and touched and sometimes tasted. Some lead to fruit or seeds or other bounty humans value or even depend upon, so a flower is also a promise. You look at a flower at one stage and know that other stages came before and will come after. The beauty of roses may also lie in the way they are appealing at every phase from bud to dried and dead, and that their fading is slow and graceful. Camelias in full bloom have a form close to roses, but they go briskly from hard bud to wide-open flower to a brown sodden mess that drops from the stem to rot on the ground, and a lot of other flowers also decline this way. “Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds,” but roses rarely fester.