‘I have a dream sometimes,” writes Olivia Laing in her new book, A Garden Against Time. “I dream I’m in a house, and discover a door I didn’t know was there. It opens into an unexpected garden, and for a weightless moment I find myself inhabiting new territory, flush with potential … What might grow here, what rare roses will I find?”
It’s a beautiful book that explores the garden as a political site – of sanctified and at times selfish seclusion in an unequal world – but also as a place of healing, hope, creativity and renewal. Melding biography with art, Laing looks at the restorative power of gardens during times of distress and plague, from planting her own during the pandemic to Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, where he settled after his HIV diagnosis and intertwined sculpture with growing santolina.
Reading this at the inception of spring, when plants are bursting out of their winter cocoons, reminded me of the artists who sought out gardens: as places of refuge, as places to exhibit their work, or, as Laing writes, to “obliterate the border between cultivated and wild”. I love visiting artists’ gardens. It’s a way of seeing their work anew and can provide a fresh insight into their character, as both gardener and artist.
My favourite remains Niki de Saint Phalle’s Tarot Garden in southern Tuscany. Saint Phalle was 25 when she declared, in 1955, that she would one day build a sculpture garden. She had visited Antoni Gaudí’s Park Güell in Barcelona, having turned to art while in a psychiatric hospital. Twenty years later, she was hospitalised again, this time for a lung abscess. Forced to relocate to an environment with cleaner air, she settled in Tuscany where, after being given a plot of land, she started work on her “garden of joy”.
For two decades, Saint Phalle worked tirelessly, aided by local workers and artist friends, to craft her paradise. She filled it with her “nana” sculptures, those bulbous female figures, giving them the form of the 22 Major Arcana tarot characters, from the glittering climbing structure that makes up the Emperor to the sphinx-shaped Empress. The latter served as Saint Phalle’s home for seven years, its insides comprising bathroom, bedroom and fully functional kitchen coated in shards of mirrored glass that, when viewed from within, makes visitors feel as if they are swimming inside a diamond. The garden, which opened to the public in the spring of 1998, was “a magic space” for Saint Phalle, who said: “I lost all notion of time, and the limitations of normal life were abolished. I felt comforted and transported. Here, everything was possible.”
Like Saint Phalle, the US photographer Lee Miller turned to her garden in a time of suffering. But rather than showcasing her art, it was a place to grow food. After joining the surrealists in Paris and then working as a war correspondent for British Vogue, capturing haunting images of the death camps, Miller reinvented herself as a cook, with her garden playing a key role.
She blocked out her previous life (it was only after her death that her son, who was unaware of her photography career, found 60,000 negatives in the family attic). In 1949, Miller, who had suffered from PTSD and postnatal depression, moved to Farleys Farm in Sussex. Declaring that “cooking is therapy”, she grew “asparagus, artichokes and American sweetcorn”. She even joked to her mother in letters, writing: “You’d laugh at me as a farmer’s wife – drying herbs, pickling things and washing spinach.” While it seemed worlds away from her previous life, I can imagine Miller relishing her time outdoors, building herself anew. Today, her garden lives on as the site for the Annual Surrealist Picnic, which encourages visitors to dress in surrealist attire, honouring Miller as both an artist and food lover.
Barbara Hepworth escaped to St Ives after the outbreak of the second world war, where her garden became a site to install her sculptures. “I prefer my work to be shown outside,” she said. “I think sculpture grows in the open light and with the movement of the sun, its aspect is always changing; and with space and the sky above, it can expand and breathe.”
I love to visit Hepworth’s garden in different seasons, to see plants decaying and regrowing, with sprouting stalks that embrace her sculptures, but also to notice how the work itself physically changes: how the light hits the surface in the greyness of winter versus how it falls in the blistering heat of summer; or if it’s been raining, to see pools of water amassing in the grooves that alter the work’s form.
Gardens offer constant stimulation, as places of personal and horticultural growth, sites of freedom, keys to an artistic Eden. I’m looking forward to seeing this in Gardening Bohemia at the Garden Museum in London, an exhibition about the artistic inspiration gardens gave female Bloomsbury artists, such as Vanessa Bell at Charleston, the house and studio in East Sussex where she lived.
Laing ends her book reminding us that gardens are a “common paradise”. They are there to be shared, to gather in, to converse in, to share ideas and to have a dialogue with those past and present. They are sites to feel inspired by, places of possibility, and, ultimately, to see the beauty of the world anew.
