THE GARDEN AGAINST TIME

The award-winning author pens a fascinating and personal journey of paradise.

When Laing, author of Everybody, Funny Weather, and other acclaimed books, bought a house in Suffolk, she did so mostly for the garden. Especially during the early pandemic, the dilapidated yet lush yard became her personal project. Spending hours with her hands in the dirt, she became enraptured not just with her own garden, but with the history of gardens and their association with paradise. The result is this intellectually stimulating, vibrant book. Laing describes gardens of her own acquaintance in sensuous, compelling detail, allowing readers to see, smell, and touch them alongside her. Similarly, the author moves through fascinating currents of thought, ranging from Paradise Lost to the history of enslavement in plantations, with tactile dexterity. “The lockdown made it painfully apparent that the garden, that supposed sanctuary from the world, was inescapably political,” she writes. As the author unpacks the fraught history of colonialism and class inequality in relation to gardens, she offers intriguing examinations of utopias. Laing describes the version of utopia espoused by 19th-century landscaper and socialist William Morris as a place where “people work because they want to, as gardeners do, out of sheer love of making something. The capitalist system of alienated labor has melted into air.” Gardens, therefore, might be historical as well as contemporary sites of inequality, but they can also allow us to imagine a more buoyant and radical future. Suffused with Laing’s distinctively skillful prose, this book is an impressive achievement. “One of the most interesting aspects of gardens: that they exist on the threshold between artifice and nature, conscious decision and wild happenstance,” Laing writes, and the author’s fascinating research and well-honed writing are a testament to the beauty of that threshold.

An intellectually verdant and emotionally rich narrative journey.