THE GARDEN AGAINST TIME: In Search of a Common Paradise, by Olivia Laing
Unlike Olivia Laing, I don’t much care for gardening. Like her, however, I’m very fond of gardens, provided my allergies are under control and there aren’t too many bugs around. What I love even more — and I suspect she feels the same way — is reading about gardens. I don’t know hellebore from hogweed, but an artfully arranged list of plant names is among my favorite poetic genres.
Laing’s latest book, “The Garden Against Time,” is bursting with such lists. Every few pages, she gathers an abundant, unruly bouquet of floral nomenclature, either of her own making or gleaned from fellow writers who have wrung inspiration from the lives of plants. She catalogs the shifting contents of her own garden (“fig and jasmine, Akebia quinata and Virginia creeper”) and surveys real and imaginary specimens from the past. There is an effortless lyricism to her descriptions, for example of a spot in Oxfordshire designed by the Victorian textile designer, reformer and essayist William Morris, “with its violets and winter aconites, its meads of tulips and fritillary, its tumbling strawberry beds infiltrated by hollyhocks and raided by thrushes, despite the nets.”
“The Garden Against Time” is partly a memoir. In 2020, Laing and her husband, the poet and translator Ian Patterson, acquired a house in Suffolk with a small garden designed by a locally prominent landscape architect named Mark Rumary. The revitalization of Rumary’s overgrown plots was a herculean project, one that unfolded through seasons of pandemic, political anxiety and personal grief. Laing shares a bit about her marriage and a little more about her childhood, her bohemian early adulthood and her father’s illness, but personal narrative serves as a trellis for what is, at heart, an impassioned and wide-ranging work of literary criticism.
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, whose other books include ruminations on writers and drinking (“The Trip to Echo Spring”) and on urban life (“The Lonely City”), as well as a novel (“Crudo”), is a natural hybridizer. She 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. If I were in an algorithmic mood, I’d mention Geoff Dyer, Teju Cole, Jenny Diski (who was married to Ian Patterson until her death in 2016) and W.G. Sebald.
Laing herself has a lot to say about Sebald, whose Suffolk perambulations in “The Rings of Saturn” overlap with her own and whose critique of the local topography helps Laing articulate one of her principal themes. “As Sebald is at pains to point out,” she writes, “the sublime parkland of the 18th-century house might look natural, with its broad expanses of closely cropped grass, its serpentine lakes and pleasant groupings of oaks, but it is a masquerade, a fantasy of what a landscape should be.”
A garden, in other words, inevitably filters nature through the lenses of human labor, creativity and will. Gardens also reflect the brutality of human social arrangements even as they express the wish to erase or overcome them. People may seek refuge among their carefully tended rosebushes and fruit trees, but the cruel and noisy outside has a way of intruding.
One of the grandest estates in Sebald and Laing’s neck of the woods is Shrubland Hall, built by a family enriched by the slave economies of Barbados and South Carolina. Laing calls it “a garden of empire,” its aesthetic glories founded on exploitation and violence. She also notes the iniquities of sharecropping in Tuscany — a feudal system that survived well into the 20th century — and traces the legacy of enclosure, the centuries-long process by which communal land all over Britain was appropriated by private interests.
What the new owners did with their holdings, Laing writes, was “to fake nature so insidiously that even now those landscapes and the power relations they embody are mistaken for being just the way things are, natural, eternal, blandly reassuring, though what has actually taken place is the seizure of once common ground.”
The kind of garden that arises from such appropriation is a fenced-in, exclusionary space, its beauty the flower of an unequal, acquisitive, individualistic society. Laing is an ardent polemicist against this kind of aesthetic corruption.
Most of her book, though, is devoted to an opposing tradition in English thought, one that sees natural beauty as a universal birthright and the garden as a democratic ideal. She celebrates Gerrard Winstanley, leader of the Diggers, who fought against enclosure in the 17th century and preached that the earth was “a common treasury”; the 19th-century “peasant poet” John Clare, whose verses capture “the beautys of artful nature”; the socialist William Morris; and the filmmaker and artist Derek Jarman, whose pastoral Prospect Cottage was a place “where the hours are not timetabled but drip like honey from a spoon.”
Throughout, Laing is aware of the troubles in paradise (a word, she reminds us, that means “garden” in one of the ancient languages of Persia), alive to the tensions inherent in her subject. She wants gardens to be open, but nonetheless admires the ways certain vines and flowers hug the walls and screen out the world. She quotes Andrew Marvell’s wistful observation that “Two paradises ’twere in one/To live in paradise alone,” but also knows that a garden is an ideal place for a party.
Above all, she allows herself, and her reader, to dream of a second Eden: “A humming, thrumming togetherness that transcends not only sexual desire but the human world itself. Call it a garden state: a cross-species ecology of astounding beauty and completeness, never static, always in motion, progressive and prolific. I want to live there, and the world won’t survive much longer if we don’t.”
THE GARDEN AGAINST TIME: In Search of a Common Paradise | By Olivia Laing | Norton | 317 pp. | $27.99
