The trees were reminders of both our own ephemerality and their endurance long beyond ours, and in their uprightness they stood in the landscape like guardians and witnesses.

The German corpse has something to tell us, and it’s about war and nationalism, and about an encounter with death. The flowers also have something to tell us in that sentence, perhaps that there’s something beyond the war, just as there’s cyclical time, the time of nature as seasons and processes imagined until recently as outside historical time.

Nature itself is immensely political, in how we imagine, interact with, and impact it, though this was not much recognized in his era.

Sometimes the shadow of death frightens or depresses people, sometimes it makes them live more vividly and take life less for granted, and Orwell seems to be among the latter. He had an austere and martial disposition in many respects, didn’t flee physical discomfort, and pushed himself through his bodily limitations until he was bedridden, then

Though flowers as the sexual organs of plants often have both male and female reproductive parts, they are routinely represented as feminine, and phenomena that have been feminized are often dismissed as ornamental and inconsequential.

Slashing away at others seemed to be a means of self-definition and self-enhancement that faded away as he grew more confident and more humane as a writer and a person.

At thirteen, he won a scholarship to the most elite of all, Eton, where he spent another four years, acquiring an accent that marked him as an outsider among the poor without making him an insider among the rich.

“Death is never an ending in nature.” And because a garden is always a place of becoming, to make and tend one is a gesture of hope, that these seeds planted will sprout and grow, this tree will bear fruit, that spring will come, and so, probably, will some kind of harvest. It’s an activity deeply invested in the future.

“They were the kind of people who . . . tack a ‘fucking’ on to every noun,” he wrote in his diary of the experience, “yet I have never seen anything that exceeded their kindness.”