Cultivating peace

George Orwell's love ofgardening inspires a volume that should appealto both the green-fingered and politically keen reader

- Gaby Hinsliff

The roses are in dire need of pruning. My rambler in particular is getting very tangled; too many whipping tendrils snaking out haphazardly at all angles. But it's so pretty it's hard to be properly brutal with it, even though it would probably benefit from some judicious thinning. And yes, it is the experience of reading Rebecca Solnit's Orwell's Roses that has jogged my memory.

The book simultaneously is and isn't about George Orwell, just as it is and isn't about roses. It belongs in a whimsical category of its own, meandering elegantly enough through lots of loosely connected subjects; more of a wildly overgrown essay, from which side shoots constantly emerge to snag the attention, than a book. But at its root is the fact that, in 1936, the writer and political thinker planted some roses in ORW his Hertfordshire garden. And when Solnit turns up on the doorstep more than eight decades later, she finds the rose bushes (or at least what she takes SO to be the same rose bushes) still flowering, a living connection with the past.

From this blooms the most enjoy by Rebe able part of the book - a reflection on what gardening may have meant to Orwell, but also what it means to gardeners everywhere; beauty for today, hope for tomorrow, and a desire to create something for those who come after all of which find an echo in the best of politics.