adonisash's Book Journey

'But this book is a garden opened and spilling over. The common paradise, that heretical dream. Take it outside and shake the seed.'

I was recommended this book two years ago, when a friend got given a proof copy, and, though I wish I'd got to it sooner, it came to me at the perfect time.

The Garden Against Time is a beautifully written blend of memoir and history. In 2020, against the backdrop of Covid-19, Olivia Laing and their husband buy a house, and Laing starts a project that will last years - restoring the garden. She meets friends of Mark - the landscape designer who originally planted the now-decrepit garden - and plans out her vision for its rejuvenation. But, as she does so, she falls down a wormhole into the history of gardens - a history that is often dark, and always political.

From Jarman's Dungeness, to Milton's Paradise Lost and everywhere in-between, Laing examines the cost of building paradise, and reckons with the contradictions of gardens. They are open and enclosed, selfless and selfish, sanctuaries and exploitative. I loved how everything ties together, and how each history is intrinsically relevant to Laing's own struggles and triumphs. This is the aspect that makes it such a satisfying book.

Laing really succeeds at proving how woven together humans and nature are. Even if you aren't a gardener (I, for one, am not), having an outdoor space is so important; and so often, an unattainable dream. As she says early on in the book - 'I lived on short-term contracts, with black mould on the walls, but the gardens made me feel permanent.' The rarity of the garden is a theme that pops up throughout - from the Enclosure Acts in John Clare's time, to the inhospitable nature of Dungeness - and is something that most readers, myself included, can relate to.

With its gorgeous, listed descriptions of flowers and bulbs, and examinations of their darker roots, this book is something you can almost smell, that brings you into the light of the garden whilst knowing what soil you tread upon.