Book Shelf: “The Garden Against Time” by Olivia Laing

I’m writing to you about this book — Olivia Laing’s The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise — before I’ve even finished it, because it’s my favorite kind of book, the kind I may spend months or even years reading and rereading and re-rereading, such that I may never actually be “finished” with it. My favorite kind of book is one that makes me want to move in and set up camp like that. Or maybe the way to describe it is that my favorite kind of book is like a treasure chest, with its author a sort of tour guide — pulling treasures out of the chest one by one, holding them up to the light, describing them beautifully but then wowing the reader (me) by drawing unexpected connections between these disparate objects and histories, even waiting patiently while I take notes about the numerous rabbit holes they’ve inspired me to dive down, or while I dive down one and then come right back. My favorite kind of book is one that would be impossible to read without a pencil in hand as I underline passages and make margin notes, along with the aforementioned list of sub-references to explore, scrawled in the back. The Garden Against Time is all of that and more.

You know that strange feeling when you read something that has nothing to do with you and yet it resonates so strongly you almost wonder if maybe it intersects with a past life or something? That’s the experience I’m having, but it’s also sort of the nature of the book. This is a memoir of the (re)making of a garden — a fave book category of mine to begin with — and any garden memoir will resonate with anyone who’s been there and done that. But in this case the author is restoring a garden with a rich history, and she digs into its history at the same time as she digs into its dirt. 

The short backstory is that in 2020 — you remember 2020 — Laing buys a house (and its walled garden) in Suffolk that previously belonged to an esteemed British garden designer named Mark Rumary. The garden has fallen into grave disrepair when Laing and her husband move in, and as she begins pulling at the chaos, trying to uncover its underlying structure, she also seeks out articles, photos, references and people who knew Rumary and this garden, each shedding some new light on it. But along the way — recall, in the middle of the Great Global Chaos and corresponding gardening craze of 2020 — she also becomes deeply interested in the history of gardens, and of mankind’s unending urge to create our own Edens. Her reading and research take her as far back as Milton’s Paradise Lost, up to W.G. Sebald’s far more recent The Rings of Saturn (which she also has me eager to reread) and to myriad touchstones in between. As with Lawn, she explores art history’s role in shaping our ideals and language around garden making. And in synthesizing multiple sources across centuries, she illuminates what it cost — particularly to those who were displaced by them — for Britain’s landed gentry to have the uninterrupted parklands that so much of gardening is still inspired by.

I’ve barely scratched the surface with this summary, and that’s just in the third I’ve read so far! But in addition to its being such rich material, Laing is a beautiful writer. I fell in love with the book on page 2 where she expresses this sentiment more succinctly than I’ve ever read it: “... [making] gardens made me feel permanent, or maybe instead brought me to terms with transience.”

For me, the book is slow going in the best possible way, as every paragraph is a portal to somewhere else — whether its spelunking a literary source or just sending me off on a reverie of my own. Not only do I already know I’ll be traversing it more than once, what I find myself doing is reading and rereading at the same time, in a sort of backwards loop. I’ve downloaded the audio and have been listening to Laing read the story to me while I’m driving or walking. But rather than picking up where I left off, when I get back to the paper book I reread the parts that were just read aloud to me, so I can absorb it again, better, and also make my marks. 

You can read the opening pages of the book in The Guardian and then hear Laing read a bit further from where that excerpt leaves off on her Instagram. And if you read the book, which I hope you will, please come back here and talk with me about it! 

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BOOKS IN THIS POST:
• The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise by Olivia Laing
• Paradise Lost by John Milton
• The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald