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A 'Book of the Year' for The Independent, The Finanical Times, The Irish Times and The New Yorker Shortlisted for the 2024 Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing 'What a wonderful book this is. I loved the enchanting and beautifully written story but also the fascinating and thoughtful excursions along the way.' – Nigel Slater 'A garden contains secrets, we all know that: buried elements that might put on strange growth or germinate in unexpected places. The garden that I chose had walls, but like every garden it was interconnected, wide open to the world . . .' In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore a walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work drew them 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 Garden Against Time is 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.
A 'Book of the Year' for The Independent, The Finanical Times, The Irish Times and The New Yorker Shortlisted for the 2024 Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing 'What a wonderful book this is. I loved the enchanting and beautifully written story but also the fascinating and thoughtful excursions along the way.' – Nigel Slater 'A garden contains secrets, we all know that: buried elements that might put on strange growth or germinate in unexpected places. The garden that I chose had walls, but like every garden it was interconnected, wide open to the world . . .' In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore a walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work drew them 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 Garden Against Time is 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.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
About the Author-
Olivia Laing is a widely acclaimed writer and critic. They're the author of several books, including The Lonely City, Everybody and Funny Weather. Their first novel, Crudo, was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller and won the 2019 James Tait Memorial Prize. Their work has been translated into twenty-one languages and in 2018 they were awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction.
Reviews-
Starred review from April 29, 2024 “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.
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