In August of 2020, after decades of precarious sublets and uninspiring bedsits, 43-year-old Olivia Laing suddenly found herself with a home of her own. Newly married to a retired Cambridge don, not only did she become owner of a magnificent Georgian house, but—more importantly for the green-thumbed writer—she became owner of its magnificent walled gardens, too. And during that anxious, Covid-inflected summer, the timing of her move couldn't have been more propitious. Gardening offered Laing an escape, just as it did so many others (almost 20 million Americans, she tells us, started a garden over the course of 2020). Through the long months of confinement, during which Laing witnessed social upheaval as well as personal tragedy, she sought to sow the seeds of something close to paradise in her own backyard.

Part memoir, part literary criticism, and part social history, ...