Today the spring sky is submerged in slate. There’s no riots of color, no butter yellows or bold fuchsias or bright pinks—just an unrelenting unfurling mass of gray. It is on this distinctly not springlike day that I finished Olivia Laing’s bewitching springtime book The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise. Part literary criticism, part personal history, The Garden Against Time explores the many meanings of paradise (interestingly, the word “paradise” originates from the Old Persian “walled garden”).
In 2020 as the pandemic raged across the planet, Laing and her husband, poet Ian Patterson, bought an 18th century walled garden in Suffolk, England. Designed by renowned landscape architect Mark Rumary, the garden had fallen from its former glory. When Laing first visited the property in January 2020, she was charmed by the walls latticed with roses though it seemed like they hadn’t been cut in centuries. Laing imagined she could revive this neglected plot much like Mary Lennox in The Secret Garden. The potential for life—she believed—still beat beneath the rotting leaves and seemingly barren soil.
The Garden Against Time ponders the many meanings of gardens. The idea of a garden of course recalls Biblical Eden and our original sin, eating from the forbidden tree of knowledge. Milton’s Eden is an abundance of life: a flowering sanctuary from the sins of civilization. Interestingly, Eden is a gated garden: it only has a single entrance. Which begs the question: who is granted entrance to Eden and who isn’t?
For Laing, the garden is an exclusionary space, off limits to the oppressed, downtrodden, outsiders, and misfits. Throughout time, marginalized people—the poor, the LGBT community, people of color—have been barred from forms of earthly paradise: equality, dignity, basic human rights. As Laing notes, the story of the “garden has from its Edenic beginning always been a story about what or who is excluded or cast out, from types of plants to types of people” (when her mother is outed, Laing herself is cast out of her conservative small town).
As some critics note, Laing’s mind is capacious and wide-ranging. Her exuberant meditation on the garden as a real and metaphoric paradise reminds me of Rebecca Solnit’s unconventional biography Orwell’s Roses. Both women are politically inclined. Both women have meandering minds that playfully frolic from subject to subject. And both women recognize the personal is always political. Like Solnit, who exposes the deplorable history of the Colombian rose trade, Laing explores the despicable legacy behind the English upper class’s most extravagant gardens.
For Laing, the garden isn’t just a botanical paradise, an earthly Edenic vision of immaculate happiness—it’s an elite space that has always operated by exploitation and exclusion. Take, for example, the grand estate described in Austen’s classic Mansfield Park (a text Solnit also alludes to in Orwell’s Roses). The family can only afford their lavish grounds and lush gardens because of the slave trade. The bountiful rose bushes bloom from the rotted soil of slavery.
Laing connects Austen’s classic to Shrubland Hall, a historic palace and garden built by yet another family who made their wealth from the slave economy. Laing understands Shrubland Hall in terms of the Marxist idea of alienation: under an inhumane capitalist system, we’re alienated from both what we produce and what we consume. English elites sipped tea among their enchanted gardens, blissfully unaware that their idle lives depended on the brutal enslavement of an entire race. They were comfortably removed from the horrors of bondage: the beatings, the floggings, the rapes. They got to enjoy the succulent fruits of other people’s labor—much like we do in the privileged west today.
(One can’t help but think of Amazon, whose over 200 million Prime members enjoy the friction-less convenience of same day shipping but don’t have to think about who’s being exploited in the chain of production to guarantee such low prices and expedited delivery).
Though gardens throughout time have been built on other people’s suffering, they have also been sites of revolution and re-imagination—places “of possibility, where new modes of living and models of power can and have been attempted.”
For writer, artist, and activist William Morris, the garden was a metaphor for the Earth’s endless riches; in his socialist utopia, beauty would be a birthright and the land’s bounty would be shared equally among its inhabitants (“What I mean by Socialism is…the realization at last of the meaning of the word COMMONWEALTH,” he declares in his 1894 essay “How I Became a Socialist”). For artist and filmmaker Derek Jarman, his garden at Dungeness was a queer utopia, a place for processing his unimaginable grief during the AIDS epidemic and a celebration of reckless aliveness in the face of his certain death.
The garden is a pit of paradoxes: it is a paradise for some, a hell for others. It embodies wilderness and civilization. Gardens are paradoxically wild spaces that are carefully crafted and curated (as Laing so elegantly expresses, the garden represents a “threshold between artifice and nature, conscious decision and wild happenstance”).
Gardens exist at the intersection of the fleeting and eternal, the timely and timeless. The garden goes “against time”—at least, capitalistic notions of it. In a garden, time doesn’t march linearly; it isn’t optimized, divided neatly by timetables and time punches. It’s more meandering. When you till soil and trim hedges, you inhabit “time freed from time,” what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called the “flow” state—that exalted condition of consciousness where you lose yourself and find yourself, where you’re so immersed in the task at hand that you enter a trance of attention where all sense of time collapses.
Yet in a garden, you’re also more acutely aware of time and the inescapable cycle of seasons. The garden encompasses life and death, fertility and decomposition. Seeds sprout into flowers whose delicate petals eventually fall and decay. As New Yorker critic Katie Kadue writes, “Gardens are both a refuge from the passage of time and a constant reminder of mutability.”
The garden is an eloquent symbol of the scope and limits of human agency. In many ways, gardening is man’s attempt to tame nature, to subjugate her savage wilderness to our will and fashion her feral flowers into an aesthetically-pleasing shape. We imagine we can achieve total dominion over the landscape. However, as Laing’s own garden demonstrates when struck by drought, you can artfully arrange the most ravishing flowers but you can’t completely control whether they flourish or flounder.
Laing’s greatest strength is her lush language. The Garden Against Time is a poetic profusion bursting forth like pink tulips. Devouring her luscious prose, I felt intoxicated like a bee drunk on honey.
Garden enthusiasts will take pleasure in her detailed catalogs of flora and fauna and delight in the minutia of her daily gardening routines: the happy exhaustion of planting and pruning, watering and weeding.
Laing’s garden of a book, however, isn’t without its aphids. Some histories are more tedious and tangentially related than others. The Garden Against Time would be better if such distracting digressions were trimmed like one of her overgrown wisteria.
And of course there’s the undeniable irony that Laing champions a “common paradise” behind the walls of her picturesque private garden. In many ways, Laing is a member of the pampered and privileged class she so passionately criticizes. While the rest of the world teeters on the brink of economic collapse during a catastrophic pandemic, her days are spent puttering in her garden and leisurely researching 17th century poets.
Though Laing fails to fully interrogate this irony, at points she does acknowledge her immense privilege. As Los Angeles Review of Books critic Manjula Martin argues, at the very least, Laing is clear “about which side of the garden gate she’s on. She stands with the dispossessed.”
Building paradise is a pressing matter considering we’re driving ourselves toward apocalypse. As Laing states, we’re poised on the “hinge of history”: fascism threatens to topple democracy, carbon dioxide chokes the air, fires engulf the planet, temperatures soar to unprecedented levels. We need to imagine new ways of living—or our species will be wiped from the world.
Ms. Laing envisions a more equitable society where we tend for the planet and each other, where the top 1% no longer control 43% of the world’s wealth. But wouldn’t that require the obscenely rich to redistribute some of their resources? to care about the common good and not just themselves?
It would take great sacrifice to create Eden for all. During the droughts Laing describes, the wealthy 1% would have to refrain from watering their massive lawns. To truly make a difference in the fight against climate change, major corporations would have to seriously reduce energy consumption while the well-to-do would have to ditch their gas-guzzling private jets and fly commercial with the rest of us. Consumers would have to curb their insatiable hunger for more. Companies would have to rethink the capitalistic model of endless growth and pause to consider whether the relentless pursuit of profit is worth the devastating environmental costs.
Laing insists “there are better ways to build a garden,” but doesn’t get specific on how. Ever the idealist, she never specifically outlines what paradise would look like nor does she acknowledge what building such a paradise would entail.
Still, The Garden Against Time’s irrepressible hope is a bouquet of flowers when so much of the world feels like barren soil.
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