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The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise
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98/99
Volume
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About This Book
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 not as a place to hide from the world but as a site of encounter and discovery, bee-loud and pollen-laden.
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Reviews
"As fragrantly replete as a long border at its peak."
"This is well worth seeking out."
"Laing is wonderfully free in her associations and does not cater to conventional expectations."
"This gives her the chance to write...glorious, looping sentences ..."
"Her authorial expertise is in the slow accrual of micro-attentions that, first loosely and then loudly, coalesce into the universal."
"Fascinating and personal ..."
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