Until I read Olivia Laing’s new book, my ideas about gardens were limited and somewhat basic. I am fortunate to have a garden and I’d rather be outside rootling about than doing almost anything else, but, as a subject, I associated gardens with notions of convention, conservatism, neatness. A little bit staid.
The Garden Against Time is Laing’s seventh book, following the novel Crudo, and five wide-ranging, critically acclaimed non-fiction books, exploring the power of art, loneliness, alcohol and writers, water and bodily freedoms. Their latest sees the writer restore a walled garden in Suffolk. Alongside this journey, which is recounted in intoxicating sensory detail, they weave a flow of material which explores ideas of the garden in Western cultural history: as Edens of beauty, refuge and radical politics, but also sites that have been used to sugar-coat the seizure of common land and the horrors of British colonialism. Most powerfully, Laing presents a radical vision for the garden in today’s time of ecological crisis.
