I didn’t grow up knowing anyone who had a traditional garden. In South Florida, where the heat is relentless and the storms are unpredictable, it takes a special kind of person to dedicate themselves to the care and keeping of a flower garden. Instead, almost everyone I knew, including my grandparents, had backyards full of tropical fruit trees. I suppose you could think of these as gardens, too, because taking care of mango, lemon, and avocado trees takes the same amount of patience, pruning, and commitment as anything else. But as kids, we often just took advantage of the gifts these trees gave us without much consideration for how much time our elders put into making sure they bore fruit at the appropriate times. Maybe it’s a way of performing penance for all the time I resented doing yard work with my grandpa that I love reading about people’s love of the natural world now — how they consider plants and treat them as members of their family or good friends, how they care for them, how they keep them alive despite our rapidly changing climate. Watching as an adult from someone else’s view of their relationship to nature has, in turn, helped me expand my appreciation beyond the wild wetlands of the Everglades and the blissful coasts of the beaches I’m more familiar with.
Olivia Laing’s latest book, The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise, is an incredibly thoughtful and well-researched memoir and examination of gardens and, more specifically, a distinct vision of their power and prominence. In 2020, Laing and her partner purchased a home in Suffolk, England mostly because of the appeal of its garden. Laing, who spent most of her life working in radical environmental activist circles and creating temporary gardens in the places she lived, saw the home’s garden as an opportunity to finally design, create, and nurture a permanent garden into place. Originally designed by famous British landscape designer, Mark Rumary, the home’s large garden turned into a much bigger challenge than Laing originally thought it might be: “In the winter [when Laing first visited the house], I’d only seen the loveliness of the structure, the sense of promise. I hadn’t really taken in how neglected it all was. Now I looked with different eyes.”
The garden’s “neglect,” of course, set Laing on mission to resurrect it into something Rumary would be “proud” of through different the various struggles of her life: the pandemic, the political anxiety of our era, and personal adversities that range from her own illness to her father’s health problems. Its promise led her on a different journey altogether, one that would take her through the annals of time, history, literature, and art to reveal simultaneously more challenges to the legacy of gardens and more reasons to celebrate the very ideas represented by the construction and creation of them.
When we’re not out in the garden with Laing mulching and reseeding plant beds and stumping trees that can’t be revived, we’re in the library with Laing learning from a pantheon of (mostly British) writers, historical figures, thinkers, and artists who share an affinity or elitist fascination for gardens and the natural world. She moves between two diverging points of view of what gardens represent and who they’re for: one that insists gardens are a human “improvement” to the seemingly untamed savageness of the natural world meant for the enjoyment of the richest amongst us and one that places gardens in tandem with the natural world as the democratic ideal of “Eden” where everyone can share in their beauty and the common gifts they provide.
She introduces us to the Middleton family, the former owners of Shrubland Hall who were able to renovate the manor and the gardens there through the fortune they made from chattel slavery in the “New World;” Capability Brown, the 18th century English landscape architect who leveled parts of the British countryside taken by law from the people who lived there to create gardens and parks that “improved” the natural landscape; Iris and Antonio Origo, the owners of the La Foce estate in Tuscany who, during World War II, bucked against the feudal system of sharecropping occurring on their land to help the people there survive attacks by the Germans and then tried to reinstate the system as soon as the war concluded. To Laing, these characters are representative of the ways she doesn’t want people to think about gardens. Through the money they made in the most grotesque manners to their poisonous ideals, they’re but just a few of the people whose dedication to capitalism and fascism highlight the artifice of the garden and the destruction that is often done to people and the natural environment for the survival of them. Their relentless pursuit of profit makes her wonder, “The ordinary people who own the world; when do they get the keys?”
Thankfully, there’s not a moment in the book where she leaves us on that note. We’re taken through her first reading, during the pandemic, of John Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost, about Satan’s rebellion and descent into Hell and Adam and Eve’s subsequent removal from Eden after falling under his trance and defying God. Her generous reading of the ending of the poem, where Adam and Eve have been expelled from the great garden, brought tears to my eyes and set the scene for the rest of her investigations in the book.
She writes, “Despite its title, Paradise Lost is not exactly nostalgic. The garden serves as a kind of lodestar, an experience of nurture and richness that cannot be dismantled and might in future be reinstated. Adam and Eve mourn their losses, grieve what won’t continue, but when eviction comes, when the cherubim gather like mist rising from a river, when they are taken by the hand and led to Eden’s gate, they look back, drop a tear, and then turn resolutely round. The final line swells with possibility. ‘The World was all before them.’ Whatever they have suffered, whatever damage has been done, the future lies open ahead.” She reminds us that “Eden” — a uniquely egalitarian natural place free from shame, greed, corruption, and, most importantly, the evils of capitalism — isn’t some far-off fantasy that can’t be rebuilt through our own efforts here on Earth.
From there, the rest of her analysis examines the works of others who tried to bring this radical, communal conceptualization of a more earthly “Eden” to life. We’re initiated into the thoughts and practices of the Diggers and their founder Gerrard Winstaley, who fought against 17th century English enclosure laws and believed the natural world was a “common treasury” for all to be part of; Victorian gardener, textile artists, and socialist reformer William Morris, who spent the second half of his life fighting against the worst aspects of our capitalist society; the 19th century poet John Clare, who tried to fight against the destruction of nature through his poetry; the writer and filmmaker Derek Jarman, whose garden at Prospect Cottage was constructed despite the harshest odds; and the artists Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines, whose art school at Benton End became an enclave for outsiders and radicals of all stripes. Through these stories, she continually prompts us to remember that while that particular envisioning of “Eden” may seem like an “impossible dream,” there are and have been many others working to bring that vision to fruition through the seeds they’ve sown both physically and ideologically. Laing writes,
“What makes a garden such an important constituent of a utopia? It is neither a farm nor a wilderness, though it can push up hard against either of these extremes. This means it betokens more than just utility, encompassing beauty, pleasure and delight, while remaining emphatically a site of labour as well as leisure, a place to please puritans and sybarites alike. The presence of gardens in a society indicates that its inhabitants have sufficient surplus energy and time to attend to cultivation that, like art-making, is not strictly speaking necessary. What’s more, they wish to do so, which perhaps conveys something positive about their emotional or even spiritual state […] If a new model of society is desired, one that attempts to share its burdens and benefits more equably, then the question of the garden becomes very interesting to contemplate.”
Like so many of us, Laing dreams of a world where people are not only free to garden — or create art or read books or do nothing — without the anxiety of finding a way to survive but one where we’ve completely restructured it to make sure we can all share equally in the gifts our world provides us. She contends that, really, “Eden” is only “impossible” if we refuse to see what Adam and Eve did at the end of Paradise Lost: a whole world belonging to us “ordinary people,” opening up to us, begging us to make that dream a reality.
Woven throughout these arguments and contemplations are Laing’s recollections of the two-year (and still somewhat ongoing) project of revitalizing Rumary’s garden in the back of her new home. The garden provides her with the space to think about her relationship to it, her memories of all the places that made her fall in love with gardens in the first place, the experience of growing up with a queer parent during some of the most difficult times for queer people, and her relationship to her gardener father. These parts constitute some of the most endearing, harrowing, and distinctive writing of the book. In these sections, we truly get to know Laing in a way I don’t think her other work gives us access to. She’s unsure of herself, heartbroken by her “failures” in her garden, disappointed in the way so many of us seem resigned to continue living in the world as it is, and, of course, joyous over what she’s able to accomplish through the labor she puts into her garden (and everything she does).
In addition, her descriptions of that labor and of the natural life she nurtures into existence are some of the beautiful and life-affirming passages in the book. If her historical and literary examinations aren’t enough to convince you of the power and pleasure of doing labor that helps give you meaning, these passages certainly will. This helps her strike a delicate and authoritative balance in the book that, once again, helps show that her story is one that exists in the context of many that came before hers. She knows her ruminations on the majesty and equitability of gardens and the natural world, her beliefs about how our society should operate, and her hopes for the future are not unique. And that’s the point. There have always been others with steadfast trust in our ability to create a better, freer, more beautiful future together, and we just have to be unafraid of listening to them. At the end, she reminds us, “There’s no point in looking for Eden on a map. It’s a dream that is carried in the heart: a fertile garden, time and space enough for all of us. Each incomplete attempt to establish it […] is like a seed that travels on the wind […] rooting itself in what seemed like the most inhospitable terrain. […] This book is a garden opened and spilling over. The common paradise, that heretical dream. Take it outside and shake the seed.”
We desperately need to keep looking back at the people who came before us as a guide to remake the world around us. They created thousands upon thousands of roadmaps for us, and in a similar vein, The Garden Against Time is doing the same. Laing doesn’t provide us with any definitive answers, but instead, leaves us to contemplate what our “Eden” could look like and calls on us to decide, once and for all, what we’re willing to do to get it.
The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise by Olivia Laing is out now.
