The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise

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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 New Yorker and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2024 • A Chicago Public Library Must-Read Book of 2024 • An Oprah Daily “Most Thought-Provoking Book” of 2024

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.

9 illustrations

From the Publisher

What role does gardening play in your life?

I’ve been a gardener longer than I have been a writer. I started exploring gardens as a child after my parents divorced, because it was my father’s preferred way of spending time. I received a lovely indoctrination into the beauty and calm of gardens. As a student deeply involved in environmental activism, I dropped out of university and went to live on road protests, in treehouses in imperilled woodlands. Later I trained to become a herbalist and was involved in community garden projects. I rented until I was forty, so my attempt to put down roots in my own gardens was regularly foiled by landlords. Now for the first time in my life I have a garden of my own. I think of gardening very much as an adjunct to writing. Both require a sense of architecture and also patient daily maintenance. My garden in Suffolk is a third of an acre and full of rare plants, but it’s also wild at the edges, defiantly shaggy and packed with surprises: exactly what I’d hope for from a book.

Are gardens tangled up with ideas of privilege and exclusion?

From Eden on, the answer is definitely yes. The very word ‘paradise’ comes from the Persian for ‘walled garden’, and a walled garden by its nature is both a place of seclusion and safety, but also expulsion and privilege. The Eden of the Bible and Milton’s Paradise Lost is a place of great beauty, but also of surveillance and eviction. What I wanted to do with this book was examine the ways that gardens have been involved in these process. Who paid for them? How? Who was included and who was left out? I look at the process of enclosure, the seizure of the common land in England by the wealthy, and I also examine how the obscene profits from colonial slavery funded a concerted beautification of the landscape. The family I track through the centuries and across continents, the Middletons, used gardens as a way of purifying their money, ascending up the class ladder until they were on close terms with the royal family. They used gardens to wash their reputations and to erase slavery from view. It’s very similar to how the Sackler family used art to distance themselves from the horrors of the opioid epidemic, from which their wealth arose. I wanted to show in a very granular way how those processes worked, but I also wanted to remain alive to the radical possibilities of gardens.

Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton & Company
Publication date ‏ : ‎ June 25, 2024
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Print length ‏ : ‎ 336 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0393882004
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0393882001
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.05 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.9 x 1.2 x 8.6 inches
Best Sellers Rank: #86,588 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #5 in Gardening & Horticulture Essays (Books) #6 in Nature Literature Criticism #1,557 in Memoirs (Books)
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