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'A garden contains secrets, we all know that: buried elements that might put on strange growth or germinate in unexpected places. The garden that I chose had walls, but like every garden it was interconnected, wide open to the world...'
In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore a walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work drew her into an exhilarating investigation of paradise and its long association with gardens. 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 Garden Against Time is 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.
Olivia Laing is a widely acclaimed writer and critic. She's the author of several books, including The Lonely City, Everybody and Funny Weather. Her first novel, Crudo, was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller and won the 2019 James Tait Memorial Prize. Her work has been translated into twenty-two languages and in 2018 she was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction.
– Shortlisted for the James Cropper Wainwright Prize Longlist 2024 for UK Nature Writing
"This isn't a historical survey of gardening, much less a practical guide, so much as an inquiry into the idea of the garden – its history and poetics, its relationship to sex, imagination and power. Laing belongs in an as-yet-undefined and perhaps undefinable class of prose artists who blend feeling and analysis, speculation and research, wit and instruction as they track down the elusive patterns and inescapable contradictions of modern experience"
– New York Times
"Buzzing and epic [...] like all Laing's works, this one is a joyful expansion on the meaning of the subject it undertakes [...] The history of gardens and gardening is a fascinating subject, but The Garden Against Time asks for more. Laing seeks a communal space where we can cherish what is most beautiful about being alive. The possiblities are what matter"
– Washington Post
"What a wonderful book this is. I loved the enchanting and beautifully written story but also the fascinating and thoughtful excursions along the way"
– Nigel Slater
"A sharp and enthralling memoir of the garden's contradiction: dream and reality, life and death, the fascination of cultivation and the political horrors that it can disguise"
– Neil Tennant
"Laing probes important questions about land ownership and exclusion and the human drive to create paradise on earth. All the while, her elegant prose bewitches and beguiles. A truly wonderful read"
– Sue Stuart-Smith, author of The Well Gardened Mind
"No one writes with more energy and ecstasy than Olivia Laing. This book is what we need right now: paradise, regained"
– Philip Hoare
"This book is as imaginatively structured and full of beauties and surprises as the garden whose creation it documents"
– Lucy Hughes-Hallett, author of The Pike: Gabriele D'Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War
"Every generation gets one perfect book about gardens and this is ours"
– Julia Bell
"Olivia Laing is a marvellous writer. So prepare yourself to be enchanted"
– Jilly Cooper
"The most magical writing, intimate, insightful, learned and brilliant"
– Jeremy Lee, restaurateur and author of Cooking: Simply and Well, for One or Many
"An extraordinary and important work. I felt doubly alive after reading it. The book is an inspiration."
– Celia Paul, author of Self-Portrait
"It takes its rightful place in the constellation that includes Jamaica Kincaid, Russell Page, Derek Jarman, and Jenny Uglow"
– Neel Mukherjee
"A magisterial work, and the exacting sensuality of her garden writing is pure pleasure, delight, surprise. It is a triumph, from a writer at the height of her powers"
– Francesca Segal
"Quite literally unputdownable. It is astonishing, funny, beautiful, wise, charming and truthful"
– Jinny Blom, author of What Makes a Garden
"A sensational work, somehow encompassing so many diverse preoccupations with a confidence and control that kept me spellbound"
– Isabel Bannerman
"Olivia Laing has written a book about making her garden, which is by turns lyrical, consoling, disturbing and inspiring. It's a book for thinking gardeners everywhere"
– Mary Keen
"Powerful, reflective and captivating to read – I loved it."
– Fergus Garrett
"A vital read in the age of climate crisis"
– Elle
"I don't think I've ever read a book that captures so well not only the deep pleasures and satisfactions of gardening, but its near-hypnotic effect on the human body and mind"
– Observer
"Could I live this way: thoughtfully, keeping in mind the fortunes of others? Twee as it sounds, if we all did, could we make the world a better place? How exquisite to hold a book that makes me believe so"
– Financial Times
"I don't think I've ever read a book that captures so well not only the deep pleasures and satisfactions of gardening, but its near-hypnotic effect on the human body and mind"
– Observer
"The Garden Against Time, despite its darker subtexts, feels like a recuperative work"
– Patrick Freyne, Irish Times
"[Laing] excelled at looking at art in The Lonely City (2016) her meditation on urban isolation in the lives and works of American painters, and she brings the same quality of attention to her new book, writing about her garden with a vigour that should carry even the least green-fingered reader [...] a wise and enthralling book"
– Independent
"A beautiful book that explores the garden as a political site – of sanctified and at times selfish seclusion in an unequal world"
– Katy Hessel, Guardian
"There is much to relish in this abundant book"
– Telegraph
"Gorgeous, enchantingly constructed non-fiction about the power and beauty of gardens"
– Harper's Bazaar
"Laing writes with joy and spirit."
– Kathleen Jamie, New Statesman
"In her soaring new memoir, The Garden Against Time, [Laing] wrestles with the political significance of the garden and asks fundamental questions about humans' relationship to the land and to each other. The result is a book not only lyrical but informative and quietly profound [...] Laing loves the beauty of gardens, and the toil of working within them. Sharing her unashamed passion is a pleasure and a privilege."
– The Tablet
"Enchanting [...] What makes this captivating book more than an elaborate journal of gardening and its fraught history is Laing's insistence on Jarman's idea that "paradise haunts gardens""
– Boston Globe
