It always comes back to the commons. Thanks to Naomi Huffman at The Atlantic for bringing this book to our attention:

What Gardens of the Future Should Look Like

In her new book, Olivia Laing argues that the lives of all people are enriched with access to land they can use freely.

On a Sunday afternoon in May, the Elizabeth Street Garden, a serene public park wedged between Manhattan’s SoHo and Little Italy neighborhoods, was filled with people undeterred by the gray sky and spitting rain. Visitors sat at tables among fuchsia azaleas and yellow irises, and in the shade of loping old trees, talking, eating pizza, and drinking iced coffee. A painter faced an easel at the back of the garden and composed a watercolor.

As with most public green spaces in New York City, it is remarkable that the Elizabeth Street Garden exists at all. It thrives on a portion of a previously abandoned lot that was leased in 1990 to the late gallery owner Allan Reiver, who cleared it of debris, cultivated many of the plants that survive today, and furnished its mythic stone statuary: several lions, a sphinx, and cherubs that add a touch of the fantastical. Amid the fiscal crisis of the ’70s, citizens began to reclaim deserted lots and transform them into community gardens fit for quiet contemplation, public gathering, and growing food; many of these gardens are now protected by land trusts. The Elizabeth Street Garden can claim no such immunity. After a 12-year legal struggle between the city and advocates for the garden, it will finally be evicted in September of this year. The lot will be sold to a conglomerate of three developers, which plans to build luxury retail storefronts and affordable housing for seniors.

In her new book, The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise, the English writer Olivia Laing presents gardens as an expression of utopian ideals, including one that’s at the core of the fight to save the Elizabeth Street Garden: the belief that people’s lives are enriched with access to land they can use freely. Surveying some of the most beloved gardens and landscapes in the United Kingdom—such as Suffolk’s ornate Shrubland Hall and Prospect Cottage, the artist Derek Jarman’s humble seaside retreat in Kent—she examines how each upheld an aspect of utopianism, or failed it completely…

Read the whole review here.