The Garden Against Time
In Search of a Common Paradise
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
Finalist for the 2024 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction
Finalist for the 2024 Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing
A #1 Sunday Times (UK) Bestseller • A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • A Kirkus Reviews "Best Book of the 21st Century (So Far)" • A New Yorker Best Book of 2024 • A Chicago Public Library Must-Read Book of 2024 • An Oprah Daily "Most Thought-Provoking Book" of 2024
"An impassioned and wide-ranging work." —A.O. Scott, New York Times Book Review
Inspired by the restoration of her own garden, "imaginative and empathetic critic" (NPR) Olivia Laing embarks on an exhilarating investigation of paradise.
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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
It seems like everybody got into something during the pandemic. For British essayist Olivia Laing, it was gardening. Specifically, she and her new husband bought a home together and began to revitalize its long-neglected but exquisitely designed garden. But this book isn’t about tending plants. Laing offers a series of meditations on what the garden has symbolized over the centuries. She muses on religion, poetry, female sexuality, colonialism, classism, and increasingly, the world’s unnerving political moment. Some essays also get quite personal, as Laing reveals why she associates gardens with her childhood, and even delves into the story of the person who designed the very garden she’s restoring. But she’s also giddily intoxicated both with the beauty of gardens themselves and the language we use to describe them. Allow The Garden Against Time to whisk you away into its meditative world. Then come back and find the beauty in ours.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"A garden is a time capsule, as well as a portal out of time," according to this searching study. Critic Laing (Everybody) examines how historical British gardens reflect the periods in which they were designed and contemporaneous understandings of paradise on Earth. Some tracts were "founded on exclusion and exploitation," Laing contends, describing how aspiring aristocrat William Middleton relied on funds from his American slave plantations to build a garden on his Shrubland Hall property in the late 1700s, and how numerous estates in the early 19th century evicted entire villages to create the impression they were surrounded by untouched wilderness. Others had more inclusive, utopian ambitions. For instance, Gerrard Winstanley, the leader of a "breakaway sect of the English Civil War" called the Diggers, pursued his communitarian vision of society by growing carrots and corn that were shared among "all who laboured on it." The lyrical prose emphasizes the ways in which gardens connect individuals across history (Laing notes that the daughters of a famous Victorian socialist minister who once owned Laing's house likely walked past the same mulberry tree that still stands in her garden), leading the author to muse that her attraction to cultivating plants stems from wanting "to move into a different understanding of time: the kind of time that moves in spirals or cycles, pulsing between rot and fertility, light and darkness." This is well worth seeking out.
