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
"The word that comes to mind is spumy: a blossomy, brimful excess that's almost too much at times ..."
"She embeds others' words in her own sentences as carefully as I imagine she transplants seedlings, adapting them to their new conditions without compromising their integrity ..."
"An intellectually verdant and emotionally rich narrative journey."
"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."
"Though enriching, the tangled histories can feel, at times, difficult to sift through."
"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 is well worth seeking out."
"Her descriptions of the garden are lyrical, even heady ..."
"The impossible position of her own book evolves in a more domestic theatre."
"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."
Preview
Reader Reviews
0 reviewsSign in to write a review.
No reader reviews yet. Be the first!