"Buzzing and epic.… [L]ike all Laing’s works, this one is a joyful expansion on the meaning of the subject it undertakes.… The history of gardens and gardening is a fascinating subject, but The Garden Against Time asks for more. Laing seeks a communal space where we can cherish what is most beautiful about being alive."— Jessica Ferri Washington Post
"Could we make the world a better place? How exquisite to hold a book that makes me believe so."— Jo Hamya Financial Times
"The Garden Against Time is the kind of book that will continue to bloom in the minds of readers as it ages, revealing new connections each time it’s picked up."— Manjula Martin Los Angeles Review of Books
"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."— Kathryn Hughes Guardian
"The most delightful portions of her memoir-cum-horticultural history, The Garden Against Time, are those…reflecting on the experience of working among flowers and soil.… Across eight chapters, Ms. Laing considers the contradictions of gardens, understanding them as at once ‘selfish and selfless, open and enclosed.’"— Angelina Torre Wall Street Journal
"[Laing] excelled at looking at art in The Lonely City (2016), 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."— Max Liu Independent
"Through deft research and her own experience in this enchanting [book]…Laing considers the loftier aspirations of gardens as paradise."— Lauren LeBlanc Boston Globe
"Laing’s delicate bouquet of language [is] certainly reason enough to read The Garden Against Time."— Naomi Huffman Atlantic
"[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."— Gavin Plumley Country Life
"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."— Brian Dillon Millions
"A vital read in the age of climate crisis."— Elle
"Landscape writing so intricate and vivid that you’ll feel transported to the English countryside."— Francesca Billington Oprah Daily
"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.’"— Scott Cheshire Bomb
"[Laing’s] lyrical prose emphasizes the ways in which gardens connect individuals across history…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."— Publishers Weekly, starred review
"An intellectually verdant and emotionally rich narrative journey."— Kirkus Reviews, starred review
"A passionate, erudite study of the garden’s role as paradise on earth."— BookBrowse
"Olivia Laing’s far-ranging and far-reaching evocation of gardening is really about gratitude and stewardship, the reverent and persistent care of growing things that are good for all humans. If you read no other gardening book this year, do read this one."— Pauline Finch Bookreporter
"Laing’s enthusiasm for her subject is infectious, and she is convincing in her assertion that exposure to nature’s beauty is a right, not an indulgence."— Sarah Moorhouse Rain Taxi
"Gorgeous, enchantingly constructed non-fiction about the power and beauty of gardens."— Clara Strunck Harpers Bazaar
"The Garden Against Time wears its erudition lightly, interweaving garden history with the cyclical work of planning and planting, decay and rebirth. It will inspire readers to get outside, shears in hand, to tend their own gardens, and invite others in."— Catherine Hollis BookPage
"Laing asks us to see the garden…as an unlikely teacher—a powerful model for looking at, sifting through and being in the world—and a place to imagine the world as otherwise."— Emily Cox Apollo
"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."— Neel Mukherjee, author of The Lives of Others
"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."— Sarah Schulman, author of Let the Record Show
"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."— Sue Stuart-Smith, author of The Well-Gardened Mind
"A sharp and enthralling memoir of the garden’s contradiction: dream and reality, life and death, the fascination of cultivation and the political horrors that it can disguise."— Neil Tennant, author of One Hundred Lyrics and a Poem
★ 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.
2024 Wainwright Prize, Short-listed
2024 Kirkus Prize, Short-listed
