George Orwell’s Roses

orange honey

This is the untouched photo of Orange Honey, an inexpensive shrub rose I purchased from Sloat’s Garden Supply fifteen years ago. Beetles have decimated the petals. But still it glows in the early morning light. I have watched this rose bloom orange, yellow, rose pink, persistently in its pot through summer heat and autumn storms. It cost me ten dollars and years of pruning.

I am inspired by Rebecca Solnit’s description in her book, ORWELL’S ROSES, of the roses George Orwell had bought for a few pence at a local market in April of 1936. He had just arrived at Wallington, a home he would live in longer than any other. With a garden and a wife he loved, in the countryside, it was the beginning of his life as a serious writer. He knew all the plants he came across walking in the countryside… which ones were budding early and which birds were singing in the garden. And he planted roses, fruit trees and gooseberries.

Ten years later he observed that ”the planting of a tree… is a gift which you can make to posterity at almost no cost and with almost no trouble, and if the tree takes root it will far outlive the visible effect of any of your other actions, good or evil."

Seventy five years later when Rebecca returned to see his garden at Wallington, the trees were gone, but the inexpensive roses he had planted were “the glory of the garden” and still blooming.

Roses can live much longer than humans, and make a lasting impact on the lives of those that care for them and enjoy them.