Publishers Weekly
★ 04/29/2024
“A garden is a time capsule, as well as a portal out of time,” according to this searching study. Critic Laing (Everybody) examines how historical British gardens reflect the periods in which they were designed and contemporaneous understandings of paradise on Earth. Some tracts were “founded on exclusion and exploitation,” Laing contends, describing how aspiring aristocrat William Middleton relied on funds from his American slave plantations to build a garden on his Shrubland Hall property in the late 1700s, and how numerous estates in the early 19th century evicted entire villages to create the impression they were surrounded by untouched wilderness. Others had more inclusive, utopian ambitions. For instance, Gerrard Winstanley, the leader of a “breakaway sect of the English Civil War” called the Diggers, pursued his communitarian vision of society by growing carrots and corn that were shared among “all who laboured on it.” The lyrical prose emphasizes the ways in which gardens connect individuals across history (Laing notes that the daughters of a famous Victorian socialist minister who once owned Laing’s house likely walked past the same mulberry tree that still stands in her garden), leading the author to muse that her attraction to cultivating plants stems from wanting “to move into a different understanding of time: the kind of time that moves in spirals or cycles, pulsing between rot and fertility, light and darkness.” This is well worth seeking out. (June)
Country Life - Gavin Plumley
"[A] broad-leafed prose poem about 'the constant cycle of decay, regeneration and return in which we all play a part.' This is a beguiling book."
Observer
"I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that captures so well not only the deep pleasures and satisfactions of gardening, but its near-hypnotic effect on the human body and mind."
Neel Mukherjee
"A book that begins as beguiling and beautiful then flicks into the revelatory: the work of salvaging a ruined garden in Suffolk becomes a book about a different kind of salvation altogether. Her mind is so agile, so capacious, so widely ranging, so consistently surprising. If I had the means, I’d present her with large plots of land every year so that she could write books such as this again and again."
Irish Times - Patrick Freyne
"The Garden Against Time, despite its darker subtexts, feels like a recuperative work."
The Millions - Sophia M. Stewart
"I’ve been a fan of Laing’s since The Lonely City, a formative read for a much-younger me…so I’m looking forward to her latest, an inquiry into paradise refracted through the experience of restoring an 18th-century garden at her home the English countryside. As always, her life becomes a springboard for exploring big, thorny ideas (no pun intended)—in this case, the possibilities of gardens and what it means to make paradise on earth."
Independent - Max Liu
"[Laing] excelled at looking at art in The Lonely City, her meditation on urban isolation in the lives and works of American painters, and she brings the same quality of attention to [The Garden Against Time], writing about her garden with a vigor that should carry even the least green-fingered reader…a wise and enthralling book."
Elle
"A vital read in the age of climate crisis."
Sarah Schulman
"A cumulative intellectual with a golden pen, Laing… connects collectivity with dirt, hand-building both private and generous new worlds as safe refuge and risky experiments."
New York Times - Peter Catapano
"Laing’s piece resonates with an idea that applies not just in the backyard or the grand estate but everywhere: The garden itself is neither good nor evil, but the gardener makes it so."
Bomb
"What we need, writes Laing, is more gardens and the health and life and collective imagination they support everywhere. Echoing Victorian gardener, writer, and artist William Morris, Laing argues that 'we need to start from our contaminated present and not some future position of undiluted purity.'"
Guardian - Kathryn Hughes
"In one way Laing’s book is an account of restoring the garden to its glory days. This gives her the chance to write such glorious, looping sentences as 'I cut back thickets of honeysuckle and discovered astrantia, known as melancholy gentleman for its stiff Elizabethan ruffs and odd, pinkish-green livery.' But just at the point where she seems in danger of disappearing into a private dreamscape, Laing pulls up sharply to remind us that a garden, no matter how seemingly paradisical, can never be a failsafe sanctuary from the brutish world. It always arrives tangled in the political, economic and social conditions of its own making…In this book Laing perfects the methodology she deployed so skillfully in her much-loved The Lonely City and more recent Everybody, of embedding biographical detours to advance rather than merely illustrate her central argument."
Sue Stuart-Smith
"Laing probes important questions about land ownership and exclusion and the human drive to create paradise on earth. All the while, her elegant prose bewitches and beguiles. A truly wonderful read."
The Millions - Brian Dillon
"Olivia Laing's The Garden Against Time is a close and vagrant meditation on the tended plot as real and metaphoric paradise, a potentially radical place to overwinter and come back out to hope."
Oprah Daily
"[L]andscape writing so intricate and vivid that you’ll feel transported to the English countryside."
Financial Times - Jo Hamya
"The Garden Against Time is remarkably vulnerable in its function as a vehicle for Laing to think through the pain of others; to mend her own shortcomings and live purposively on her patch of land…Could I live this way: thoughtfully, keeping in mind the fortunes of others? Twee as it sounds, if we all did, could we make the world a better place? How exquisite to hold a book that makes me believe so."
Financial Times
"[The Garden Against Time is a] celebration by the acclaimed writer and critic of the abundant pleasures and possibilities of gardens—not as a place to hide from the world but as a site of experiment and discovery—that ranges from pandemic Suffolk to utopian visions of a new Eden, while also examining the sometimes shocking costs of making paradise on Earth."
Fritz Haeg
"This is an enthralling book about creation, world-making, and communion. We desperately need stories like this today. It is a book of seekers and dreamers looking for something else. Not idle reverie, but the daily dirty hands in the ground labor of conjuring and cultivating. The making and re-making, right out the door, in the dirt, and alive. Coursing through the story is the intimate account of one abandoned garden, someone else’s dream, that our Olivia is discovering and bringing back to life, day after day. While engrossing tales of other personal utopias over the centuries are woven through, some walled and monastic, others exhibitionist and expansive, like the touchstone Derek Jarman's Prospect Cottage: “My garden's boundaries are the horizon.” These edens are interrogated with other urgent and current questions of access and privilege, who gets to create their own utopia on this earth, and who is left behind, outside the gardens walls. At the heart of the book Laing is holding up for us the “fertile revolution…every time you look into a garden, the invitation is still there."
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2024-04-04
The award-winning author pens a fascinating and personal journey of paradise.
When Laing, author of Everybody, Funny Weather, and other acclaimed books, bought a house in Suffolk, she did so mostly for the garden. Especially during the early pandemic, the dilapidated yet lush yard became her personal project. Spending hours with her hands in the dirt, she became enraptured not just with her own garden, but with the history of gardens and their association with paradise. The result is this intellectually stimulating, vibrant book. Laing describes gardens of her own acquaintance in sensuous, compelling detail, allowing readers to see, smell, and touch them alongside her. Similarly, the author moves through fascinating currents of thought, ranging from Paradise Lost to the history of enslavement in plantations, with tactile dexterity. “The lockdown made it painfully apparent that the garden, that supposed sanctuary from the world, was inescapably political,” she writes. As the author unpacks the fraught history of colonialism and class inequality in relation to gardens, she offers intriguing examinations of utopias. Laing describes the version of utopia espoused by 19th-century landscaper and socialist William Morris as a place where “people work because they want to, as gardeners do, out of sheer love of making something. The capitalist system of alienated labor has melted into air.” Gardens, therefore, might be historical as well as contemporary sites of inequality, but they can also allow us to imagine a more buoyant and radical future. Suffused with Laing’s distinctively skillful prose, this book is an impressive achievement. “One of the most interesting aspects of gardens: that they exist on the threshold between artifice and nature, conscious decision and wild happenstance,” Laing writes, and the author’s fascinating research and well-honed writing are a testament to the beauty of that threshold.
An intellectually verdant and emotionally rich narrative journey.
