The Garden Against Time

In Search Of A Common Paradise

Format: Hardback
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Shortlisted for the 2024 Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing

'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 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 them 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.

Write a Review
  • 5
    A must read

    Posted by Joyceanne on 28th Jun 2024

    Enjoyed this immensely. I’m a keen gardener but it was all the other topics that she writes about that informed and engaged me more

Authors:
Laing, Olivia
Year Published:
2024
Country of Publication:
United Kingdom
Format:
Hardback
ISBN:
9781529066678
Publication Date:
02/05/2024
Publisher:
Pan Macmillan
Number of Pages:
336
Place of Publication:
London
Language:
English
SKU:
9781529066678

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