The most famous garden, certainly in literature, is the Garden of Eden. It’s a paradise, Olivia Laing writes in her new book, for which “every story told about it also incorporates it into a political framework,” from Milton’s “Paradise Lost” to the present day. It’s impossible to read Laing’s buzzing and epic “The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise” without thinking about Gaza, a relatively small patch of land increasingly in ruins. “War is the opposite of a garden, the antithesis of a garden,” Laing writes, “its furthest extremity in terms of human nature and human endeavor.”
Laing wrote “The Garden Against Time” during the pandemic, from her new home in Suffolk, England, which includes an 18th-century walled garden. The restoration of that garden provides the structure for the book. But like all Laing’s works, this one is a joyful expansion on the meaning of the subject it undertakes. Laing is intent on finding and exercising freedom through her writing — “In Search of a Common Paradise” is a subtitle that could be applied to most of her books. “Everybody: On Freedom” explored the concept of the body via the thought of figures like Freud and Susan Sontag. “Funny Weather” gathered Laing’s essays about artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and David Wojnarowicz. “The Lonely City” swooned over the art of being alone.
For Laing, a garden is a protective space, a place for making herself at home. She remembers her early years as a student at a convent school. “My mother was in a closeted relationship with a woman, and when I was nine she was outed among the parents at the convent,” Laing writes. “It was impossible to stay in our village or school and we ended up moving to a new town hundreds of miles away, where we knew no one.” The garden in Suffolk is a means for Laing of getting back to herself, returning home.
But of course, the land that comes with the house, and access to land in general, is a luxury afforded only to some. In her native country, due to the passage of thousands of Enclosure Acts, “by 1914, over a fifth of the total area of England had been enclosed, a prelude to today’s enraging statistic that half of the country is owned by less than 1 percent of the population.” Working in her garden during the pandemic provided her much solace and stress relief, and she cites a study from 2021 finding that in America, “white people are nearly two times as likely as Black or Asian citizens to have access to a garden.” Obviously, a family that lives in a cramped apartment in a densely populated city is at much higher risk for covid exposure than one that lives in a private residence with access to fresh air and space.
Laing writes of the beauty and splendor of her subject, but she also emphasizes that gardens and landscapes are property with a capital P. “At first I thought it was the gardens that were being compared to paradise, as in heaven,” Laing writes, of her studies on Milton. “But to my surprise the concepts ran the other way round.” Paradise as we use it “derives from the Avestan word pairidaeza, which means ‘walled garden.’” A garden with a wall is a private garden — meant to keep the owners in and interlopers out.
Through the story of the Romantic poet John Clare, Laing pursues an earlier idea of the garden “against time,” or the garden as a refuge against capitalization and privatization, a place of pure wildness and erotic naturalness. Clare’s descent into madness was closely aligned with the Enclosure Acts, when the untamed nature of England celebrated in his poetry was essentially stolen by the upper class. More than 5 million acres of open fields were brought into private ownership. Many of the plots were developed by wealthy families in England who were also plantation owners and colonists in what would become America. Laing is sure to note the connections between their wealth and slavery.
Clare voluntarily entered a mental asylum in 1837, escaping in 1841, only to be taken to another asylum later that year and certified insane. He remained in that institution until he died in 1864. His story is “a true testament to what plants can mean, how they can root and steady a person,” Laing writes, and “a testament too to the damage that is done when the relationship between people and land is severed, deliberately and for the purpose of profit.”
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The filmmaker and multi-hyphenate artist Derek Jarman is a North Star for Laing. In his last years, before dying of AIDS in 1994, at 52, Jarman moved to a cottage in Dungeness, Kent, and cultivated a wild garden there. It’s the subject of his memoir “Modern Nature” (Laing recently provided an introduction to a new edition of the book). Laing herself identifies as nonbinary. Her appreciation of Jarman’s “longing for beauty” in his garden is not so much a celebration of his queerness as it is a celebration of the freedom and joy of unspoiled youth. “It also had roots in the childhood needs that had gone so badly unfulfilled, which he was teasing out on paper at the same time that he was making the garden,” Laing writes.
If all this sounds a little much, a constant flurry of references and digressions, it is. Laing is wonderfully free in her associations and does not cater to conventional expectations. Any of the stories in “The Garden Against Time” could inspire a full-length book, but it’s one of Laing’s talents to corral them in one place without alienating the reader. Other subjects include the artist Cedric Morris and his partner Arthur Lett-Haines, who established “an open-minded enclave of hedonism and hard work” at Benton End, their Tudor house in Suffolk; textile designer William Morris and his embrace of socialism; painter Eliot Hodgkin’s landscapes of the wildflowers that took over bombed-out London in the 1940s; and the English-born Italian aristocrat Iris Origo, who would offer safe harbor to refugees and soldiers during World War II at her estate, La Foce.
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. The possibilities are what matter. As 10-year-old Mary Lennox asked, hopefully, in the classic children’s novel “The Secret Garden,” “Might I have a bit of Earth?”
Jessica Ferri is a writer based in Berkeley, Calif., and the author, most recently, of “Silent Cities San Francisco.”
The Garden Against Time
In Search of a Common Paradise
By Olivia Laing
W.W. Norton. 317 pp. $27.99
