ON THE BOOKSHELF: The Garden Against Time by Olivia Laing

Who is Olivia Laing, you may wonder? She is a British writer who trained as a herbalist, which for her, made the ordinary more intricate. She did not own a house until her mid-40s and lived on short term contracts with mould on her walls.  In every place that she lived, she patched together a shabby garden to make her feel at home. She often drifted from commune to commune, most of them inspired by environmental activism.

All detailed in her work The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise.

In her 40’s she married an older widower and together they bought the house of Mark Rumary, a famous landscaper. They fell in love with his well-tended garden the winter that COVID announced itself, but on closure a few months later, she realized the extent of decay and ruin.

Ah, she thought, a perfect renewal project and dug down into the earth, but in doing so her intellect was fertilized and she also became obsessed with the study of the history of the garden. 

As she used her body by day to move, weed, redesign and replant, at night her mind was busy studying heaps of history. I met so many fascinating and conflicted characters – Adam & Eve, Milton, John Clare, estate owners too many to mention, Iris Origo, Capability Brown, William Morris. They are now on my radar of lives to investigate and works to read, starting with Paradise Lost. 

Let’s just talk about Milton for a moment. He revealed the garden as a locus of power. Estate owners damned rivers, drained marshes, moved full-grown trees and even villages to attain their idea of heaven on earth. Country houses as displays of wealth. These days people use private jets, yachts and rocket ships. 

But this had all been on the backs of workers. A deep dive shows that many estate owners were also slave owners in the Caribbean and America and funnelled the wealth from these plantations to create their own paradise for all to admire. She suggests that the gardens at the Middleton estate would take one hundred slave a decade to create. Middleton became an MP and baronet and his motto was Respect my right. 

Of course, this put her into a spiritual funk, but every day she was pulled back by the demands of foxgloves, orchids, snowdrops, fountains, decisions, planting, potting. 

After she finally got her garden beautiful and vibrant enough to be part of the national garden tours, Britain suffered a devastating drought. Much of her garden withered and died. But this provided a new epiphany for this writer who was fuelled by the radioactive material of her own past.

Luckily, the garden went on with her.