The Beatle Gardener

Looking forward to Scorsese's new film about George. Loved the article in Newsweek:

Equal to his passion for music, and his diverse and close friendships was George’s overwhelming desire to get back to earth—literally so, to dig, to plant trees, to surround himself with flowers that he himself had grown.

A gardener is inevitably someone with humility, who sees that these trees will eventually outlive him; the gardener is generous, optimistic, nurturing, taking pleasure in the planting but also making something beautiful for others. In George’s case, the gardens he made gave him the sense that he was living in isolation, on an island of his own making. “It’s great when I’m in my garden,” he is quoted as saying in the book of the film, a family album of extraordinary intimacy, edited by Olivia, “but the minute I go out the gate I think, what the hell am I doing here?”

Of George’s passion for gardening, well documented in Scorsese’s film, Olivia has said that his interest began with his father in his vegetable lot in Liverpool. But he went so much further. The most obvious characteristic of the houses that he built, or bought and fixed up in the course of his life, are the gardens he planned and planted.

“It’s fascinating to me that it manifested itself as hope, and nurturing,” Scorsese said. “Whatever problems he had, he was still out there, doing the gardening himself. Maybe it’s meditation. It helped to cut away the madness of the world around him. It fascinates me to think that he creates music like this and … he gardens! And he does everything in between. It gives him a different way of looking at life. The reality of it is that it’s a way of finding some peace with yourself.”