Most people who've written about English author George Orwell haven't been very interested in his love of gardening, Rebecca Solnit explains.
And yet, Orwell once professed it was the thing he cared about the most.
"He was an avid anti-fascist and an avid gardener," Solnit tells ABC RN's Late Night Live.
The US author has long been a fan of Orwell, the author who invented Big Brother and the nightmare world of the "thought police" in his novel 1984. She's re-read the book regularly since she was a teenager.
So in 2017, while on a UK book tour, she decided to take a detour through the English countryside to see if she could find some of the fruit trees Orwell had planted at his cottage in Wallington, south of London. She discovered they were long gone.
But all was not lost.
When she knocked at the cottage door, she was welcomed in by the people now living there — and they offered her a delectable piece of information.
"You know, Orwell's roses are still growing," they told her. They took her behind the cottage to reveal the "big, unruly rose bushes blooming away".
"It blew my mind," says Solnit, whose latest book is inspired by the experience.
She'd heard about the roses' existence but, upon seeing them, she encountered more than just flowers – they were a living, tangible connection to the man who planted them decades ago.
Seeing them also made her wonder why Orwell had planted them.
"[They] made Orwell present in a way that being with a living thing – that had been with him when he was himself a living thing – does," she says.
"But also because I realised I'd never thought hard enough about what those roses meant."
Planting 'for pleasure and beauty and joy'
Through Orwell's roses, Solnit gained an insight into the mind of the writer many still view as incredibly serious – the kind of practical man who'd plant for food, not decoration.
"But roses planted on that scale can only be for pleasure and beauty and joy," Solnit says. She became curious to learn more about Orwell's relationship with pleasure.
"The more I looked, the more I found an Orwell that wasn't the grim, stern, austere, pessimistic figure we're all so familiar with," she says.
Solnit discovered that Orwell "devoted himself to small and not so small pleasures" like gardening, fishing, wandering the countryside, a good cup of tea, a good pub, nursery rhymes and fairy tales.
She describes the insight as "instructive" as it challenged her notions about how to live, especially in the face of serious issues such as climate change action, which Solnit has long campaigned for.
You can, Solnit has since accepted, be both mindful of small, simple beauties and simultaneously concerned with significant, even existential, issues.
"I believe that often in order to do the really important work we're here to do on Earth, you may need to do stuff that seems trivial, irrelevant, self-indulgent, beside the point, luxurious, lightweight [and] all those things people will damn you with," Solnit says.
"You may need to do those things to do your really important work."
Simple joys make hard work do-able
In 1936, Orwell took a job reporting on the working class in the industrial north of England. He was "looking at the unemployed, the mine workers, the grim living conditions of people in these utterly befouled landscapes, black and dead with coal", Solnit says.
When he finished that assignment, he moved to the tiny cottage in Wallington, south of London, which Solnit would visit, and started planting up his garden.
"Going straight from the coal mines to the garden was, in a way, trying to find what is the opposite of that hellscape of deadness and making something wonderfully alive," Solnit says.
In his subsequent writing, Orwell worked "incredibly hard against fascism, totalitarianism, propaganda and lies, and wrote the best novel of the 20th century about all those things" she says. He also "took good care of himself".
For example, he loved wandering through junk shops, hunting their dusty, half-broken treasures. And he recommended others do the same.
Solnit argues that to see such pleasures as the dusty junk, the cup of tea or the roses as "disconnected from the serious work" is to miss the point.
"They're often the things we're defending."
Without devoting time to contemplating nature and beauty, and maintaining a "deep grounding in the senses", there is a risk that "we become embittered, become mirrors of what we oppose [and] get lost in various ways", she says.
Orwell's passionate gardening and embracing of other small joys of life may have allowed him to endure "facing unpleasant facts" as he put it, Solnit says.
"He's a man who died young of tuberculosis but with a fishing rod in his room, because he was still hopeful that he might get well enough to go to a Swiss sanatorium and get a little bit of fishing in."
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