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In Search of a Common Paradise
by Olivia Laing
Book Reviewed by: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 18th 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.
Gardening is as much an intellectual endeavor for Laing as it is a physical one, and the roots of her thinking run deep. She makes room in this expansive book for figures ranging from the Greek historian and philosopher Xenophon to Toni Morrison, but the greatest space is given over to micro-biographies of those who, like herself, have sought to plant paradise. Between vignettes from her own struggles, Laing introduces figures like John Clare, the 19th-century "peasant poet" who captured the natural world in verse; Iris Origo, the heiress whose Italian estate turned refugee camp in the Second World War; and Capability Brown, the landscape architect whose vision of rolling hills and untouched valleys reshaped the English countryside. All these disparate parts undoubtedly give the The Garden Against Time a loose feel, but Laing is skillful enough to gather her anecdotes into satisfying bouquets. Indeed, her taste in prose certainly matches her taste in flora; the writing is overabundant and knotty, but always hovering on the right side of unmanageable...continued
Full Review
(822 words)
(Reviewed by Alex Russell).
Neel Mukherjee, author of The Lives of Others
A book that begins as beguiling and beautiful then flicks into the revelatory: the work of salvaging a ruined garden in Suffolk becomes a book about a different kind of salvation altogether. Her mind is so agile, so capacious, so widely ranging, so consistently surprising. If I had the means, I'd present her with large plots of land every year so that she could write books such as this again and again. Sarah Schulman, author of Let the Record Show
A cumulative intellectual with a golden pen, Laing… connects collectivity with dirt, hand-building both private and generous new worlds as safe refuge and risky experiments. Sue Stuart-Smith, author of The Well-Gardened Mind
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..jpg "Old English Garden at Danson Park in London")
In The Garden Against Time, Olivia Laing traces the evolution of gardens and the different meanings they have taken on in society. One major European development she addresses is the work of Capability Brown and the advent, in the mid-18th century, of a style that came to be known simply as the English garden.
Lancelot "Capability" Brown was born in 1716. The son of a land agent and a chambermaid, he started his career as an under-gardener at Stowe House, a stately home not far from Oxford, before quickly climbing the ranks to become head gardener of the estate in his mid-20s. By this time, a certain aesthetic ideal was starting to bloom in the gardens of England's aristocracy. Every earl and baron in the country dreamed of ...
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