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The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise
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38/99
Critics' Rating Index
45/99
Readers' Rating Index
82/99
Scholars' Citation Index
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Volume of Reviews
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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
"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."
"I preferred to languish in what's basically a love story, with all the passion and intimacy this involves."
"Extended discussions of war, disease, and climate crisis do nothing to dampen the tone of the book, which proceeds like a pleasant garden-party conversation."
"Her descriptions of the garden are lyrical, even heady ..."
"Her authorial expertise is in the slow accrual of micro-attentions that, first loosely and then loudly, coalesce into the universal."
"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.'"
"This isn't a historical survey of gardening, much less a practical guide, so much as an inquiry into the idea of the garden — its history and poetics, its relationship to sex, imagination and power."
"This is well worth seeking out."
"Wears its erudition lightly, interweaving garden history with the cyclical work of planning and planting, decay and rebirth."
"The impossible position of her own book evolves in a more domestic theatre."
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