Illustration by Lauren Tamaki

There is more to The Garden Against Time than we appreciated with the first review we read, so thanks to Katie Kadue for this:

The Paradoxical Paradise of the Garden

Olivia Laing’s memoir of restoring a garden unearths the politics and history of cultivating a plot.

The reader of “Paradise Lost” encounters the Garden of Eden at the same time that Satan does. Having leapt over the garden wall, Milton’s athletic antihero flies up into a tree to survey his new surroundings. “Beneath him with new wonder now he views,” Milton writes,

To all delight of human sense expos’d
In narrow room Nature’s whole wealth, yea more,
A Heav’n on Earth, for blissful Paradise
Of God the Garden was, by him in the East
Of Eden planted.

Milton’s Paradise is an enclosed space, a “narrow room,” designed—albeit imperfectly—to keep trespassers out. In this, it’s much like most gardens, which, as Olivia Laing writes in “The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise,” have historically been exclusive affairs. Laing, who goes by both “she” and “they,” loves gardens, but she doesn’t love that they are often private property, accessible only to those who can afford them, sometimes at the expense of the lives and livelihoods of those who can’t. She longs for an all-inclusive paradise—at least, part of her does. Buried, not so deep, in this book’s topsoil is a tension between Laing’s progressive political commitments and aesthetic preferences that she worries are tied to élitism, inequality, and injustice. Is the private garden, she asks, a “tarnished, even contaminated zone, a source of unquestioned privilege, the gleaming fruit of dirty money”? Or can it be “a place of possibility, where new modes of living and models of power can and have been attempted”?

Laing found her own Eden in January, 2020. Not long before covid hit Britain, she and her husband toured what would become their home together, in Suffolk, a couple of hours’ drive northeast of London. The house, as she explains in the book’s opening, was previously owned by the late garden designer to the stars Mark Rumary, and Laing’s infatuation with its long-overgrown garden is immediate. Hidden from the street, surrounded by brick walls covered in climbing wisteria and honeysuckle, the garden is divided by hedges into secret corners, each containing surprises: a raised pond, a greenhouse, plants both familiar (a daphne, “the first plant I’d fallen in love with, the first botanical name I’d learned as a child”) and strange (“a medlar, a tree I only knew from Shakespeare’s joke in Romeo and Juliet about what maids call the fruit: open-arses”). It’s like a fairy tale, or a medieval romance, or Frances Hodgson Burnett’s children’s classic “The Secret Garden,” or J. G. Ballard’s “The Garden of Time,” a story about aristocrats eking out their final days in a magical private garden—they buy time by plucking a dwindling supply of “time flowers”—before an angry mob breaches the walls. (Ballard’s story was the inspiration for this year’s Met Gala, that most exclusive of exclusive affairs.)

When the couple moves in in August, the pandemic in full bloom, Laing begins to bring the neglected garden back to life: pruning, weeding, working “just as an editor rakes over a text, looking for what doesn’t belong,” reclaiming paradise from bindweed and couch grass. As she works, she’s plagued by guilt. Not everyone could weather the pandemic in a private garden, and when a drought hits Suffolk one summer, she agonizes over irrigation decisions. But she’s energized by the hope that gardens, as physical and spiritual oases, might “be a place of rehearsal” for a better relationship with nature. In search of inspirational plots, she reads about the gardens of the past. She discovers that the word “paradise” comes from Avestan, an ancient Iranian language and means “walled garden.”She finds this image both charming—her own walled garden is quite literally a paradise—and unsettling, especially in the isolationist age of Brexit and Trump…

Read the whole review here.