Home › Books › The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Pa…
The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise
by
38/99
Critics' Rating Index
45/99
Readers' Rating Index
82/99
Scholars' Citation Index
98/99
Volume of Reviews
84/99
Volume of Reader Ratings
Sign in to add to your shelf, rate, or review this book.
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
"She doesn't quite pull it off."
"The glimpses of personal memoir are intriguing ..."
"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."
"It is the strength of Laing's book to offer an alternative view of the garden, not only as a refuge but also as a source of ideas vital for a changing world – one of a resurgent authoritarian politics, nature degradation and climate change – without breaking the spell of the garden as a form of communal paradise."
"Fascinating and personal ..."
"Laing considers the contradictions of garden ..."
"Laing is a welcoming but unobtrusive hostess, handling her dark materials with social grace ..."
"The word that comes to mind is spumy: a blossomy, brimful excess that's almost too much at times ..."
"Remarkably vulnerable in its function as a vehicle for Laing to think through the pain of others; to mend her own shortcomings and live purposively on her patch of land."
"What makes this captivating book more than an elaborate journal of gardening and its fraught history is Laing's insistence on Jarman's idea that 'paradise haunts gardens.'"
Preview
Reader Reviews
0 reviewsSign in to write a review.
No reader reviews yet. Be the first!