Rebecca Solnit - Orwells Roses

In the spring of 1936, a writer planted roses. I had known this for more than three decades and never thought enough about what that meant until a November day a few years ago, when I was under doctors orders to recuperate at home in San Francisco and was also on a train from London to Cambridge to talk with another writer about a book Id written. It was November 2, and where Im from thats celebrated as Da de Los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. Back home, my neighbors had built altars to those who had died in the past year, decorated with candles, food, marigolds, photographs of and letters to those theyd lost, and in the evening people were going to promenade and fill the streets to pay their respects at the open-air altars and eat pan de muerto, bread of the dead, some of their faces painted to look like skulls adorned with flowers in that Mexican tradition that finds life in death and death in life. In a lot of Catholic places, its a day to visit cemeteries, clean family graves, and adorn them with flowers. Like the older versions of Halloween, its a time when the borders between life and death become porous.

But I was on a morning train rolling north from Kings Cross in London, gazing out the window as Londons density dissipated into lower and lower buildings spread farther and farther apart. And then the train was rolling through farmland, with grazing sheep and cows and wheat fields and clusters of bare trees, beautiful even under a wintry white sky. I had an errand or perhaps a quest to carry out. I was looking for some treesperhaps a Coxs orange pippin apple tree and some other fruit treesfor Sam Green, whos a documentary filmmaker and one of my closest friends. He and I had been talking about trees, and more often emailing about them, for several years. We shared a love for them and the sense that someday he might be making a documentary about them, or we might join forces to make some kind of art about them.

Sam had found solace and joy in trees in the hard year after his younger brother died in 2009, and I think we both loved the sense of steadfast continuity a tree can represent. I had grown up in a rolling California landscape studded with several kinds of oak trees along with bays and buckeyes. Many individual trees that I knew as a child are still recognizable when I return, so little changed when I have changed so much. At the other end of the county was Muir Woods, the famous redwood forest of old-growth trees left uncut when the rest of the area was logged, trees a couple hundred feet tall with needles that condense moisture out of the air on foggy days and drip it onto the soil as a sort of summer rain that only falls under the canopy and not in the open air.

Slices of redwood trees a dozen or more feet across, with their annual rings used as history charts, were popular in my youth, and the arrival of Columbus in the Americas or the signing of the Magna Carta and sometimes the birth and death of Jesus would be marked on the huge disks in museums and parks. The oldest redwood in Muir Woods is 1,200 years old, so more than half its time on Earth had passed before the first Europeans showed up in what they would name California. A tree planted tomorrow that lived as long would be standing in the thirty-third century ad , and it would be short-lived compared to the bristlecones a few hundred miles east, which can live five thousand years. Trees are an invitation to think about time and to travel in it the way they do, by standing still and reaching out and down.

If war has an opposite, gardens might sometimes be it, and people have found a particular kind of peace in forests, meadows, parks, and gardens. The surrealist artist Man Ray fled Europe and Nazis in 1940 and spent the next decade in California. During the Second World War, he visited the sequoia groves in the Sierra Nevada and wrote of these trees that are broader than redwoods, but not quite as tall: Their silence is more eloquent than the roaring torrents and Niagaras, than the reverberating thunder in [the] Grand Canyon, than the bursting of bombs; and is without menace. The gossiping leaves of the sequoias, one hundred yards above ones head, are too far away to be heard. I recalled a stroll in the Luxembourg Gardens during the first months of the outbreak of war, stopping under an old chestnut tree that had probably survived the French Revolution, a mere pygmy, wishing I could be transformed into a tree until peace came again.