The Garden Against Time

by Olivia Laing
The Garden Against Time cover
Good Books rating 4.25
Essays / Essay Collections
Technical:
  • ID: 487
  • Added: 2025-09-12
  • Updated: 2025-09-13
  • ISBN: 9781529066708
  • Publisher: Picador
  • Published: 2025-03-06
  • Formats: 4
  • Reviews: 3
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Waterstones
Paperback • £10.99

In 2020, Olivia Laing began restoring a walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden that sparked an exhilarating investigation into the idea of paradise and its deep connection to gardens. Moving fluidly between real and imagined spaces—from Milton’s Paradise Lost to a wartime sanctuary in Italy, and from aristocratic pleasure grounds funded by slavery to queer utopias—Laing examines the often troubling costs of creating paradise on earth. Her writing reveals gardens as sites of history, politics, and social justice, reflecting the times and power structures in which they were made. Beyond the shadows of exclusion and privilege, Laing presents gardens as places of resistance, communal dreams, and new ways of living. Highlighting figures like Derek Jarman and William Morris, she shows how gardens can be experimental spaces for radical futures, especially vital in an era of climate change. The book is a lush, sensory tapestry that celebrates gardens not as escapes but as vibrant encounters with the world, full of hope, complexity, and possibility.

Reviews
Goodreads · 2025-09-12
evocative 4.00

Laing's prose is lush and sensory, presenting gardens as sites of resistance, friendship, and radical futures beyond capitalist productivity.

This review appreciates the book's rich and floriferous prose style, which invites readers into a complex understanding of gardens as both idyllic and politically charged spaces. It notes Laing's exploration of historical figures and utopian ideals embedded in gardening, emphasizing how gardens can imagine alternative futures and serve as sites of resistance and care. The review acknowledges the tension between the beauty of gardens and the uncomfortable historical realities they often mask, making the book a thoughtful invitation to reconsider our relationship with nature and society.

Quick quotes

    Gardens... can be a site for imagining utopias and cultivating radical futures.

    Laing's attempts to grasp the remedial and revolutionary potential of Eden is presented to us in lush, verdant, sensual prose.

    The book works to welcome readers into recognising the uncomfortable facts behind our ideas of idyll and visualising gardens as spaces for resistance, friendship, and care.

The Bookends Review · 2025-09-12
reflective 4.50

The book serves as a complex, multi-layered contemplation of gardens as metaphors for political, economic, and social issues, emphasizing the interplay of life, death, and resistance.

This review presents Laing's book as a rich, many-faceted exploration that uses gardening as a metaphor for broader societal dynamics, including capitalism and enclosure acts. It praises her ability to weave historical narratives, such as John Clare’s tragic life and Iris Origo’s wartime sanctuary, into a broader meditation on paradise, loss, and communal dreams. The garden is portrayed not just as a physical space but as a locus for political resistance, historical memory, and the acceptance of mortality.

Quick quotes

    The garden provides a fertile metaphor for even the most abstract principles of politics and economics.

    Laing’s acceptance of 'the presence of death in the garden' reminds her of the 'soon unpayable cost' of the illusion of perpetual growth in the age of capitalism.

    Laing unspools the tale of Iris Origo... who opened the property as a safe haven for refugees from World War II—thereby politicizing her paradise.

Rain Taxi · 2025-09-12
thoughtful 4.25

The book is a meditation on gardening as a creative and political act, intertwining personal restoration with broader historical and social contexts.

This review highlights how Olivia Laing uses gardening not just as a personal solace during the pandemic but as a lens to explore larger political and historical themes. The garden becomes a paradoxical space reflecting both the hope and anxiety of contemporary times, linking Laing's personal experience with wider issues such as environmental crisis and social injustice. The review appreciates Laing's engagement with the troubled histories of gardens, from Eden to aristocratic estates tied to slavery, and her ongoing critique of the political status quo.

Quick quotes

    Laing rejoiced in how 'the outside world receded' as she replaced doom-scrolling on her phone with weeding and sowing.

    Gardens reflect the times they were created in, from the Garden of Eden and the grounds owned by eighteenth-century slave traders to the imaginative oasis that artist Derek Jarman cultivated.

    Laing describes how gardening became a 'solace' and even a 'compulsion' at a time when it felt that 'everything I wanted to say sounded exactly like the sort of thing a person like me would say, a stupid liberal.'

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