NATURE
The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise
Olivia Laing
Picador, $44.99

“I dream that I am 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.” So writes Olivia Laing at the opening of The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise, their seventh book.

In the pages that follow, this dream becomes reality. After meeting and marrying a garden-loving man, they buy a house so they can create or restore a garden together. In early 2020, Laing sees a photograph of a house in Suffolk whose garden bears an uncanny resemblance to their dream, learns it was designed by distinguished British gardener Mark Rumary, and mentally takes refuge there when COVID strikes. Hoping to buy it, they resolve: “If I did get Rumary’s garden, I would restore it … but I would also trace how it had intersected with history.”

The Garden Against Time is a record of this restoration and of Laing’s exploration of some of the historical roots of their garden and of English gardening more generally, with the aim of attempting to “count the cost of building paradise” and to seek “versions of Eden that weren’t founded on exclusion and exploitation”. These are great and timely undertakings: restoring gardens, fathoming their hidden costs and seeking what beneficent lessons they might have for us.

But Laing’s ambitions go further: exhausted by the agonising news cycle of the pandemic, they also long to enter the cyclical, spiral time of the natural world: “I had an inkling even then that the gardener is initiated into a different understanding of time, which might also have a bearing on how to preclude the apocalypse we seem bent on careering into.”

Although the moment of actual purchase is not recounted (an intriguing omission), Laing and their husband successfully buy the property, and the book charts the ensuing three years to the garden’s public opening in 2023.

Like Laing’s five previous works of nonfiction, The Garden Against Time seamlessly blends memoir, biography, history, politics, art, literature and explorations of the ways in which we inhabit this present, embodied moment – in this case, by gardening. It’s deeply informed by Rumary’s exuberant vision and so becomes as much an homage to Rumary (who died in 2010) and British garden design, as a testament to the act of gardening itself.

Grounded in the labour the garden’s reclamation requires, Laing follows the threads this unearths, from garden tropes (“paradise”, “Eden”) and iconic figures such as John Milton, William Morris and Derek Jarman, to lesser-known rebels, painters and writers of flowers, weeds and wastelands of war, and the economic underpinnings of the wealth that financed the grand houses and gardens of the British Empire. Woven through are accounts from Laing’s diary of seasonal rhythms, illnesses, gatherings, visits to other gardens, and the daily news.