Name: The Garden Against Time
Rating: 4.416666666666667 (6 reviews)
ISBN: 9780393882001

Olivia Laing

Named as one of the Most Anticipated Books of 2024 by The Observer, BBC, Irish Times, and The Guardian Inspired by the restoration of her own garden, "imaginative and empathetic critic" (NPR) Olivia Laing embarks on an exhilarating investigation of paradise.

In Search of a Common Paradise

The Garden Against Time

‘A garden contains secrets, we all know that: buried elements that might put on strange growth or germinate in unexpected places. The garden that I chose had walls, but like every garden it was interconnected, wide open to the world . . .’ In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore a walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work drew her into an exhilarating investigation of paradise and its long association with gardens. 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.

At no point picking this up, did I expect to be this invested in it. Part diary, (in much larger) part meditation on the history and politics of the English garden, "The Garden Against Time" is both a reflection of our times and a richly informative near-academic work. The connections between art, socio-economics and gardening that Laing makes may not always be evident from the first few pages of a chapter but inevitably leave the reader with a fully developed understanding of the intricacies and implications of gardening and the curation of large garden spaces.

The section discussing this in relation to William Morris moved me deeply. I found the chapter focusing on the link between gardening, Eden and John Milton also inordinarily engaging. This was a library copy so I am placing a pre-order on the paperback edition as we speak.

At no point picking this up, did I expect to be this invested in it. Part diary, (in much larger) part meditation on the history and politics of the English garden, "The Garden Against Time" is both a reflection of our times and a richly informative near-academic work. The connections between art, socio-economics and gardening that Laing makes may not always be evident from the first few pages of a chapter but inevitably leave the reader with a fully developed understanding of the intricacies and implications of gardening and the curation of large garden spaces.

The section discussing this in relation to William Morris moved me deeply. I found the chapter focusing on the link between gardening, Eden and John Milton also inordinarily engaging. This was a library copy so I am placing a pre-order on the paperback edition as we speak.

The Garden Against Time In Search of a Common Paradise

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