Just as the first lockdown was easing, which is to say in summer 2020, Olivia Laing moved into a Georgian house in Suffolk that came with the tangled remnants of a once-glorious walled garden. She had always been a plant person, having spent her 20s training to be a herbalist, but a lifetime of insecure accommodation had meant making do with borrowed plots and communal corners. Now, in addition to getting a garden to call her own, Laing had also acquired something equally wondrous: a husband. After two decades of being single, she had recently married the poet Ian Patterson, a man of her parents’ generation.
The garden, then, was going to have to contain an awful lot of hopes and anxieties, not to mention a great deal of radical clearing and imaginative making. This sky-high expectation was not just because it was Laing’s first garden, nor even because it was where she was going to put down permanent roots, but because it had been created by a famous plant man. In 1961 Mark Rumary, of the esteemed Suffolk nursery Notcutts, had bought the house and set about turning the garden into the kind of Arts and Crafts masterpiece for which he was internationally known.
