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The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise
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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.
Reviews
"Laing perfects the methodology she deployed so skilfully in her much-loved The Lonely City and more recent Everybody, of embedding biographical detours to advance rather than merely illustrate her central argument."
"This is well worth seeking out."
"A joyful expansion on the meaning of the subject it undertakes ..."
"Whatever occasional disagreements I had with it were fruitful, bred by a spirit of intended generosity imbued within the text."
"Laing possesses a low-key but vigorous sense of curiosity, and she is drawn to nuance and coincidence."
"She gathers an abundant, unruly bouquet of floral nomenclature, either of her own making or gleaned from fellow writers who have wrung inspiration from the lives of plants ..."
"Without the salt of humour, or even much light and shade, to add savour and variety to the fine writing, it felt like a pummelling."
"Laing is a welcoming but unobtrusive hostess, handling her dark materials with social grace ..."
"Her descriptions of the garden are lyrical, even heady ..."
"Though enriching, the tangled histories can feel, at times, difficult to sift through."
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