His letters and diaries reveal his careful observation of the nature surrounding him and of field expeditions throughout his life, even when he was in Catalonia or at the sanatorium in Kent in 1938.
An "As I Please" article published on 21 January 1944 that referred to rambler roses that he had planted at the cottage in which he had lived before the war[3] had brought correspondence criticising his bourgeois nostalgia.
[4] Orwell describes the emergence from hibernation of the common toad and its procreative cycle and offers it as an alternative to the skylark and primrose as a less-conventional example of the coming of spring.
How many times have I stood watching the toads mating, or a pair of hares having a boxing match in the young corn, and thought of all the important persons who would stop me enjoying this if they could.
The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.