The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common 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.

Author: Olivia Laing
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 06/25/2024
Pages: 336
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.08lbs
Size: 8.53h x 5.85w x 1.14d
ISBN: 9780393882001

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 04/29/2024
Kirkus Reviews 05/01/2024
BookPage 06/01/2024

About the Author
Laing, Olivia: - Olivia Laing is an internationally acclaimed writer and critic. She is the author of seven books, including The Lonely City, Funny Weather, and Everybody. Her first novel, Crudo, was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller and won the 2019 James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Her work has been translated into twenty-one languages and in 2018 she was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize for nonfiction. She lives in Suffolk, England.