A writer and an antifascist, George Orwell was also a gardener, and Rebecca Solnit suggests that this aspect of the British icon sheds light on all of his other activities. Solnit finds echoes in the photographs of Tina Modotti, Caribbean colonialism, and the brutal rose industry in Colombia that supplies the American market, and her finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award concludes with a rereading of Nineteen Eighty-Four that completes her portrait of a more hopeful Orwell.