{"id":15260,"date":"2024-10-24T09:23:54","date_gmt":"2024-10-24T16:23:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/hortlib\/?post_type=book&p=15260"},"modified":"2024-11-01T11:00:38","modified_gmt":"2024-11-01T18:00:38","slug":"gardenagainsttime","status":"publish","type":"book","link":"https:\/\/depts.washington.edu\/hortlib\/book\/gardenagainsttime\/","title":{"rendered":"The Garden Against Time : In Search of a Common Paradise"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"The Garden Against Time<\/a> offers pleasures on multiple fronts. Olivia Laing weaves together elegantly a narrative of reviving her English garden originally designed by Mark Rumary, a well-known landscape designer; numerous accounts of other gardens and gardeners, some literary and some real; and a thread of deep searching into the exclusion underlying nearly all these gardens.<\/p>\n

Although Laing had yearned for a garden of her own since early childhood, she was in her forties when she and her husband Ian found the right neglected garden to restore \u2013 in January 2020. It was only a third of an acre, \u201cso cunningly divided that you could never see the entirety at once . . .\u201d (p. 5). Then came Covid, and everything shut down. Three million people in Britain began gardening, and Olivia and Ian moved into their new home in August.<\/p>\n

Preparing the soil with huge amounts of manure, waiting impatiently for a year to see which of Rumary\u2019s original plants had survived, then laboring many months to put her plans in place \u2013 the story makes one ache in sympathy but feel inspired as well.<\/p>\n

The other gardens in the book begin with Eden in John Milton’s \u201cParadise Lost,\u201d and the poems of John Clare bewailing the enclosure of once public land. They include real English and Italian gardeners and gardens, especially Shrubland Hall.<\/p>\n

William Morris receives much attention. One of this book\u2019s great pleasures is Laing\u2019s writing style. Her description of Morris shows that style nicely: \u201cIt\u2019s true he was a dynamo, a spinning top, who compulsively taught himself to master a dozen crafts, who could weave a tapestry and dye a chintz, embroider a wall-hanging, construct a stained-glass window, write a poem (often on a bus and often too at the astounding rate of a thousand lines a day), illuminate a manuscript, bind and print a book, perhaps translating Homer or Virgil as an evening\u2019s respite from the more exacting work\u201d (p. 161). This book could be used in advanced writing classes as an example of how to play with the English language as if it were a musical instrument.<\/p>\n

The subtitle, \u201cIn Search of a Common Paradise,\u201d refers to the book\u2019s underlying theme of unease about the unsavory underpinnings of many gardens \u2013 certainly all those Laing visits in this book. Do only rich people get to have gardens? Why can\u2019t everyone have access to that soul satisfying pleasure Laing found in hers? Her research led to the slave trade behind Shrubland Hall\u2019s wealth. On the other hand, Morris hoped for the opposite, a utopia where gardens (and all properties) are held in common.<\/p>\n

Instead, Laing opts for a combination of public and private ownership: \u201cWe need gardens and the life they support established everywhere, if we are to survive\u201d (p. 284). We do.<\/p>\n

Many additional delicious nooks and crannies await the reader of \u201cGardens Against Time.\u201d Run, do not walk, to the nearest library (ours). Don\u2019t miss this book.<\/p>\n

Reviews by Priscilla Grundy in The Leaflet<\/em>, Volume 11, Issue 11, November 2024.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Garden Against Time offers pleasures on multiple fronts. Olivia Laing weaves together elegantly a narrative of reviving her English garden originally designed by Mark Rumary, a well-known landscape designer; numerous accounts of other gardens and gardeners, some literary and some real; and a thread of deep searching into the exclusion underlying nearly all these gardens. Although Laing had yearned for a garden of her own since early childhood, she was in her forties when she and her husband Ian…<\/p>\n

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