The Garden Against Time

I have always enjoyed the way Olivia Laing writes. Just as mycelium grows from a single reference point outward in many directions, Laing creates a web of insight and interconnections that carry the reader through her curiosity and storytelling. The Garden Against Time is no exception, ranging through the lives and work of Milton, William Morris, Thomas Moore, John Clare, Derek Jarman and the aristocratic Middletons, among others, to question what a garden is; what people, ideas and costs shape these seemingly idyllic spaces, and what they mean in a broader socio-cultural and political context. Hinged particularly on Milton, and how his ‘Paradise Lost’ is inextricable from colonial thought, this inquiry is grafted onto what is essentially a memoir.

For Laing, garden ownership was something she aspired to through years of rental instability and finally found in Suffolk with her husband during the pandemic. They both became custodians for almost a hectare, designed by the late landscape architect Mark Rummary. Her writing about rejuvenating Rummary’s garden is fertile with beautiful descriptions of wine glass crocus and tiny iris flowers revealing themselves as she navigates the anxieties of honey fungus, along with her own personal upheavals.

These were my favourite parts of the book; feasting on lists of species whose fragrance almost wafted off the page. However, the inclusion of so many references to historical figures, gardens and artwork, though fascinating, was also overwhelming at times. Much of the book assumed knowledge I didn’t have, and by the end I was thirsty for visual references of garden varietals, paintings and photography – references I have never needed when reading her other titles.

So for The Garden Against Time, I advise patience. It is a beautiful book best read in a well-known garden, where you can break to sit on a bench and contemplate the artful or useful beauty around you. Or, as Laing reflects upon, the unconscionable cost of gardens originally created for those who grew rich off the backs of enslaved African people in the ‘new world’, for whom the gardens were perhaps an avenue for spending an accumulation of money so large they could not think of anything else to do with it.