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The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise
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Original price was: $27.99.$22.27Current price is: $22.27.
Detailed description:
An Oprah Daily Summer Reading Recommendation
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
A #1 Sunday Times (UK) Bestseller
Inspired by the restoration of her own garden, “imaginative and empathetic critic” (NPR) Olivia Laing embarks on an exhilarating investigation of 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.
9 illustrations
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Product group:
Categories: Arts & Photography
Product name:
The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise
Price:
Original price was: $27.99.$22.27Current price is: $22.27.
Carol H –
The Garden Against Time brings the practice of art and writing to the garden; a memoir-cum-history of gardening, it presents curating a space for plants as a creative process, one just as involved with the imagination as writing can be. She examines numerous thinkers enthralled by gardens and gardening and forms a collection of ideas. Laing’s book is, as she declares, “a garden opened and spilling over.” Gardens, for her, are a site of radical possibility; her Instagram bio labels her as a “writer/gardener,” and this dual identity, which saw Laing drop out of an English Literature degree in her early twenties to train as an herbalist, is tied up with her environmentalism and fierce social conscience.
In 2020 at the time of Covid, Olivia moved, with her husband, the poet Ian Patterson, to a village in Suffolk. They bought a beautiful cottage with a walled garden which had been owned by the renowned garden designer, Mark Rumary and Olivia resolved to return the garden to its former glory and to write about this process.
Because she couldn’t travel to research or explore other gardens for inspiration or direction, she turned to books for her way out of the isolation of that time. She used the contemporary, global, and political upheaval we were experiencing to look at how gardens had been created in the past through exploitation and privilege, and what we could do to create a better future for our natural and societal world.
This is a beautiful book that boasts memoir, history, and political debate, drawing on examples in literature and art through the centuries. There’s so much here and it provided me with an interestingly calm contemplation that I don’t get with many books. It was informative, interesting, and thoughtful. I enjoyed this greatly.
Robert J. Mealing –
Buckle up, you’re in for quite a journey in this fabulous book. The people, the places, the stories… I learnt so much and enjoyed every moment of it.
Ashley Tame –
The new book from one of our greatest cultural commentators is a source of excitement (indeed, I counted down for months!). This book is not only from one of my favourite writers, but is based within my favourite place: the garden. Not that it keeps within the accidental boundaries of a garden wall: Laing welcomes everyone from the nineteenth century poet/plantsman John Clare, to the visionary Derek Jarman; thereby tackling topics from the enclosures to the beauty of a garden as a healing artwork, among others.
People are, as ever, forefront in Laing’s work. The personality and vision of those mentioned permeates the page as fertiliser for the gardens she concurrently explores and develops at her new home. Themes that coalesce in the garden she creates for her poet husband in a neglected area previously used for a wedding marquee when the house was in the care of the previous owner. The history of the house and garden are also explored, resulting in exciting passages of living botanic-archaeology as she rediscovers plants from old photographs that go on to miraculously thrive under Laing’s loving – and increasingly green-fingered – hand.
This is not some idyllic, saccharine, luvvy pouring, however; Laing never fails to address the difficult aspects of her subject, nor to challenge our assumptions. Those who have been kept out of the garden are acknowledged, just as the evils that helped to create the grand gardens of the past are addressed and the indelible stain on that formal planted shown.
A brilliant achievement. We are fortunate to be alive in the time her books are released.
Margie –
What good is a garden book without pictures? I enjoyed some of this book, but many of the plants were unfamiliar to me. Drawings or photos of some of the plants would be very helpful, as well photos of the author’s gardens.
salsa-holic –
Great condition just as described, speedy service, thank you.
wilksie –
Laing and her husband moved into an old house once owned by a famous garden designer, Mark Rumary, but the garden had been neglected for years. The book is about her efforts to bring the garden, a third of an acre divided into different garden ‘rooms’, back to life, beginning during the pandemic in 2020 and ending sometime after the heatwave and drought in 2022. I loved reading about her struggles – and her joy as she worked. I identify so much with her, being just four months into garden restoration myself and seeing my garden very much as consisting of separate areas or rooms. While I am looking at a wildlife garden, Laing is more concerned with planting, but everything we are both doing seemed to be for much the same reasons. I would have loved the book for this alone. However, this is not a book about one garden. Laing has researched the history of her garden and brought into the book a multitude of different garden themes, from the garden of Eden, through Paradise Lost, via John Clare and enclosure, aristocratic houses built on slavery and oppression of the poor to Derek Jarman and exclusion, London bomb sites, the German invasion of Italy and drought and privilege. Laing is coping with anxiety, not only about the state of the world, but also about family events and I could understand how the garden work can be both soothing and healing. I rarely finish a book and want to go straight back to the beginning and start again, but that’s what I wanted to do with this book. Loved it.
tum22 –
After reading a number of favourable reviews I bought this book for my Kindle and was extremely disappointed. I had expected so much more about her own garden; instead she rambled on about nothing in particular and certainly not related to the garden. Some of the ramblings were slightly tenuous but most were well away from the subject. If she managed a dozen lines a chapter about her own garden efforts, then it was quite an achievement. I would not bother to buy anything from this author.
B Cochran –
Describes both the author’s and others’ work ofbplanting, tending, or restoring gardens during times of human crisis. How gardens help tip the balance toward hopefulness. Blends universals and particulars.. But may require familiarity with England, it’s history and culture, to be fully appreciated.