From Dystopia to Dahlias: George Orwell’s Secret Garden Life
This botanical history post was featured on The Daily Gardener podcast:
May 25, 1939
On this day, George Orwell, an English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic, wrote that his hens had laid two hundred eggs in the previous two weeks.
Who would have thought that the author of 1984 and Animal Farm would be so intimately involved with the day-to-day lives of his feathered friends?
Upon returning to his Wallington home after the Spanish Civil War, Orwell, recuperating from war injuries and lung ailments, turned his keen observational skills to his chickens. With the same meticulous attention he applied to his writing, he recorded their daily egg production, behavior, dietary needs, and care requirements.
Let us delve into Orwell's April entry, penned three years after his arrival at Wallington:
We have now twenty-six hens, the youngest about eleven months.
Yesterday seven eggs (the hens have only recently started laying again.)
Everything greatly neglected, full of weeds, etc., ground very hard & dry, attributed to heavy falls of rain, then no rain at all for some weeks. . . .
Flowers now in bloom in the garden: polyanthus, aubretia, scilla, grape hyacinth, oxalis, a few narcissi. Many daffodils in the field...
These are very double & evidently not real wild daffodil but bulbs dropped there by accident.
Bullaces & plums coming into blossom.
Apple trees budding but no blossom yet.
Pears in full blossom.
Roses sprouting fairly strongly.
What a vivid tableau Orwell paints!
Can you not envision the neglected garden, the hard, dry ground, and then the explosion of spring blooms defying the harsh conditions?
The mystery of the double daffodils in the field adds a touch of whimsy to this meticulous account.
Well, there you go - a little update from George Orwell about his garden over 90 years ago.
And before I forget, there's a fabulous book from 2021 called Orwell's Roses by Rebecca Solnit, and when it debuted, it received all kinds of critical acclaim. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for non-fiction, and the writer, Margaret Atwood, raved that it was an exhilarating romp through Orwell's life and times — and also the life and times of roses.
And Harper's said that it was "A captivating account of Orwell as a gardener, lover, parent, and endlessly curious thinker."
And then the publisher wrote this,
"In the spring of 1936, a writer planted roses."
So begins Rebecca Solnit's new book, a reflection on George Orwell's passionate gardening and the way that his involvement with plants, particularly flowers, illuminates his other commitments as a writer and antifascist, and on the intertwined politics of nature and power.
As we reflect on Orwell's unexpected role as a chronicler of chickens and cultivator of roses, let us consider how these gentle pursuits might have influenced his literary works.
Perhaps, in tending to his garden, Orwell found a respite from the weighty political themes that dominated his writing.
Or perhaps, in the cycles of nature and the tenacity of blooms pushing through neglected soil, he found metaphors for the resilience of the human spirit in the face of totalitarian regimes.