An enchanting, informative, and absolutely fascinating walk with the author through the history and mystery, and the pleasure and pain of gardens. In 2020, just as the first Covid lockdown hit our shores, Olivia Laing bought a beautiful house and neglected garden which she began to restore. I was prepared to fall in love with this book before I even started, however wasn’t expecting the deep depths and extending of thoughts that it offered me. Olivia Laing opens not only her own garden, but also herself and therefore the book begins to feel like a treasured friend as you read. She writes with an eloquent and intelligent hand, creating beguiling paths through which you wander. The book meanders through the blossoming of her garden, history, literature, famous gardens, new techniques and thoughts, and verdant possibilities. While undoubtedly offering joy and hope, it doesn’t shy away from the pain and cost of the traditional country house garden or the challenges of environmental change. This serves to highlight the extremes of feelings that gardens can provoke, where we attempt to tame, to nurture, to create. I adored this book and it joyfully steps into our LoveReading Star Books and sits as a Liz Pick of the Month. Highly recommended, The Garden Against Time is a mesmerising and inspiring read.
In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore an eighteenth-century walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work brought to light a crucial question for our age: Who gets to live in paradise, and how can we share it while there's still time? 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 gardens: not as a place to hide from the world but as a site of encounter and discovery, bee-loud and pollen-laden.
