Solnit recounts the Day of the Dead festivities that take place on November 2 each year in the San Francisco area where she lives and works. This year’s Day of the Dead finds the author on a train in England, however. She’s traveling north from London in search of trees for herself and a friend who happens to be a documentary filmmaker: “[W]e both loved the sense of steadfast community a tree can represent” (4). She ruminates on the longevity of trees and the stalwart nature of gardens. Nature survives in the face of human folly, such as war, she suggests.

This leads her to recall an essay that she once read, “A Good Word for the Vicar of Bray,” by George Orwell. She’s struck by his empathy and the range of his writing. Orwell’s essay suggests that planting a tree is one of the most powerful “contribution[s] to posterity” an individual can make (8), and Solnit thinks she may have found a different kind of Orwell than the one popularly known. Instead of the author famously focused on the cruelties of war and the injustices of totalitarianism, the Orwell that Solnit discovers is one preoccupied with trees and awed by nature.