The Garden Against Time
In Search of a Common Paradise
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In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore an eighteenth-century walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work brought to light a crucial question for our age: Who gets to live in paradise, and how can we share it while there's still time? Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton's Paradise Lost to John Clare's enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Laing interrogates the sometimes shocking cost of making paradise on earth. But the story of the garden doesn't always enact larger patterns of privilege and exclusion. It's also a place of rebel outposts and communal dreams. From the improbable queer utopia conjured by Derek Jarman on the beach at Dungeness to the fertile vision of a common Eden propagated by William Morris, new modes of living can and have been attempted amidst the flower beds, experiments that could prove vital in the coming era of climate change. The result is a humming, glowing tapestry, a beautiful and exacting account of the abundant pleasures and possibilities of gardens: not as a place to hide from the world but as a site of encounter and discovery, bee-loud and pollen-laden.
About this Author
Olivia Laing is an internationally acclaimed writer and critic. She is the author of seven books, including The Lonely City, Funny Weather, and Everybody. Her first novel, Crudo, was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller and won the 2019 James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Her work has been translated into twenty-one languages and in 2018 she was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize for nonfiction. She lives in Suffolk, England.
Reviews
"Buzzing and epic.... [L]ike all Laing's works, this one is a joyful expansion on the meaning of the subject it undertakes.... The history of gardens and gardening is a fascinating subject, but The Garden Against Time asks for more. Laing seeks a communal space where we can cherish what is most beautiful about being alive."
"Could we make the world a better place? How exquisite to hold a book that makes me believe so."
"The Garden Against Time is the kind of book that will continue to bloom in the minds of readers as it ages, revealing new connections each time it's picked up."
"In one way Laing's book is an account of restoring the garden to its glory days. This gives her the chance to write such glorious, looping sentences as 'I cut back thickets of honeysuckle and discovered astrantia, known as melancholy gentleman for its stiff Elizabethan ruffs and odd, pinkish-green livery.' But just at the point where she seems in danger of disappearing into a private dreamscape, Laing pulls up sharply to remind us that a garden, no matter how seemingly paradisical, can never be a failsafe sanctuary from the brutish world. It always arrives tangled in the political, economic and social conditions of its own making.... In this book Laing perfects the methodology she deployed so skillfully in her much-loved The Lonely City and more recent Everybody, of embedding biographical detours to advance rather than merely illustrate her central argument."
"The most delightful portions of her memoir-cum-horticultural history, The Garden Against Time, are those...reflecting on the experience of working among flowers and soil.... Across eight chapters, Ms. Laing considers the contradictions of gardens, understanding them as at once 'selfish and selfless, open and enclosed.'"
"[Laing] excelled at looking at art in The Lonely City (2016), her meditation on urban isolation in the lives and works of American painters, and she brings the same quality of attention to [The Garden Against Time], writing about her garden with a vigor that should carry even the least green-fingered reader.... [A] wise and enthralling book."
"Through deft research and her own experience in this enchanting [book]...Laing considers the loftier aspirations of gardens as paradise."
"Laing's delicate bouquet of language [is] certainly reason enough to read The Garden Against Time."
"[A] broad-leafed prose poem about 'the constant cycle of decay, regeneration and return in which we all play a part.' This is a beguiling book."
"Olivia Laing's The Garden Against Time is a close and vagrant meditation on the tended plot as real and metaphoric paradise, a potentially radical place to overwinter and come back out to hope."
"A vital read in the age of climate crisis."
"Landscape writing so intricate and vivid that you'll feel transported to the English countryside."
"What we need, writes Laing, is more gardens and the health and life and collective imagination they support everywhere. Echoing Victorian gardener, writer, and artist William Morris, Laing argues that 'we need to start from our contaminated present and not some future position of undiluted purity.'"
"[Laing's] lyrical prose emphasizes the ways in which gardens connect individuals across history...leading the author to muse that her attraction to cultivating plants stems from wanting 'to move into a different understanding of time: the kind of time that moves in spirals or cycles, pulsing between rot and fertility, light and darkness.' This is well worth seeking out."
"An intellectually verdant and emotionally rich narrative journey."
"A passionate, erudite study of the garden's role as paradise on earth."
"Olivia Laing's far-ranging and far-reaching evocation of gardening is really about gratitude and stewardship, the reverent and persistent care of growing things that are good for all humans. If you read no other gardening book this year, do read this one."
"Laing's enthusiasm for her subject is infectious, and she is convincing in her assertion that exposure to nature's beauty is a right, not an indulgence."
"Gorgeous, enchantingly constructed non-fiction about the power and beauty of gardens."
"The Garden Against Time wears its erudition lightly, interweaving garden history with the cyclical work of planning and planting, decay and rebirth. It will inspire readers to get outside, shears in hand, to tend their own gardens, and invite others in."
"Laing asks us to see the garden...as an unlikely teacher--a powerful model for looking at, sifting through and being in the world--and a place to imagine the world as otherwise."
"A book that begins as beguiling and beautiful then flicks into the revelatory: the work of salvaging a ruined garden in Suffolk becomes a book about a different kind of salvation altogether. Her mind is so agile, so capacious, so widely ranging, so consistently surprising. If I had the means, I'd present her with large plots of land every year so that she could write books such as this again and again."
"A cumulative intellectual with a golden pen.... [Laing] connects collectivity with dirt, hand-building both private and generous new worlds as safe refuge and risky experiments."
"Laing probes important questions about land ownership and exclusion and the human drive to create paradise on earth. All the while, her elegant prose bewitches and beguiles. A truly wonderful read."
"A sharp and enthralling memoir of the garden's contradiction: dream and reality, life and death, the fascination of cultivation and the political horrors that it can disguise."
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