📚 Orwell’s Roses,
by Rebecca Solnit
Nonfiction / Biography / Essays / Nature
2021
320 pages
Counts for BookBound
and for #Nonficnov 2025

I was very impressed by Rebecca Solnit’s writing in Wanderlust, so I decided to read more by her.
And as I had read a fascinating nonfiction on Orwell (Finding George Orwell in Burma, by Emma Larkin) I thought it would be good to see what Solnit had to say.

Orwell’s Roses is a collection of 27 essays, organized into seven parts.
They explore various topics connected to George Orwell’s life, his interests, and broader social and cultural themes.

I love how Solnit intertwine politics of nature and power, with her premise that Orwell’s choice of place of living (a small and humble English village) and his detailed care for roses and gardening in general, reflects and speaks about his commitment for freedom – and not just as a writer, as for instance he did go to fight against fascism in Spain, and went to work in mines to truly document his writing about miners and their working conditions.

Nature itself is immensely political…
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. (Part 1, chap.3)

Solnit’s books are so rich. There are so many elements in this one, I can only give a quick glimpse. The first chapter on trees could be the object of an entirely additional review!
And she does speak a lot about roses as well, not just in Orwell’s life: their place in history and culture, and our crazy current market for cut roses any time of the year, and bringing them from Bogota (“Colombia raises 80 percent of the roses sold in the United States”! – we are talking about around 6 million roses for big celebrations like Valentine’s Day or Mother’s Day), where workers are exposed to huge amounts of toxic chemicals, to keep these roses fresh when you receive them, and where the groundwater goes to that industry and leaves the locals waterless.

I’ll be including here a lot of quotations I’d like to keep.

What struck me most was the 4^th part on Stalin.
The way Stalin dismissed and even killed real scientists to support pseudo-scientists is so tragically contemporary…

When scientific autonomy is lost,” said Baker, “a fantastic situation develops; for even with the best will in the world, the political bosses cannot distinguish between the genuine investigator on the one hand and the bluffer and self-advertiser on the other.” And scientific autonomy had been lost. Baker declared that Trofim Lysenko, the director of the Institute of Genetics at the Soviet Academy of Agricultural Science, “provides a vivid illustration of the degradation of science under a totalitarian regime.”

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.

What did it mean to be the enforcer of lies, to prop up illusions and conceal brutal realities, to demand obedience to a version of reality that was a result of your orders and suppressions rather than the data?

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.
Orwell wrote in 1944, “The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits ‘atrocities’ but that it attacks the concept of objective truth; it claims to control the past as well as the future.”

The attack on truth and language makes the atrocities possible.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is a warning about present as well as potential dangers, in defense of all the things Orwell valued, and on this reading of the book I noticed them too. A warning is not a prophecy: the former assumes that we have choices and cautions us about the consequences.

Solnit synthesizes so well Orwell’s input:

Orwell’s signal achievement was to name and describe as no one else had the way that totalitarianism was a threat not just to liberty and human rights but to language and consciousness, and he did it in so compelling a way that his last book casts a shadow—or a beacon’s light—into the present. But that achievement is enriched and deepened by the commitments and idealism that fueled it, the things he valued and desired, and his valuation of desire itself, and pleasure and joy, and his recognition that these can be forces of opposition to the authoritarian state and its soul-destroying intrusions.
The work he did is everyone’s job now. It always was.

If you are ready for an eye-opener book, this one is for you.

MY VERDICT:
Gardens are acts of resistance—eye-opening essays on everything from Stalin’s war on truth to Colombia’s toxic rose trade. Essential reading for our age of lies.

What do you think?
What’s your favorite book by Solnit?