Olivia Laing’s The Garden Against Time is an eminently readable book that is very dense in material and ideas. She has stated that this book is about the complexity of paradise. My take on her approach is that it is a layering of her personal experience throughout her life of gardens (paradise?) and her personal experience of not so much restoring as reviving a garden (and house) she and her husband bought at the outbreak of covid. In working on her garden she was led first to learn more about Mark Rumary, the plantsman who had owned the house and planted the garden sixty years earlier. From there she branched out to a history of a number of gardeners (sometimes poets more than gardeners) and gardens. In parallel with this historical delving and her personal experiences, she weaves in the politics of gardens and their connection to paradise. The British estates were largely built from the money acquired from slavery. She also recounts the British enclosement and poor laws that separated the English workers from the land as the Industrial Revolution gathered steam, so to speak. And she counters that experience with the attempts at communal living that date back to the Victorian years.
But what does that have to do with me, you might be asking. After all, we’re gardening in New Mexico. The political issues around land and ownership should cause us all to think. Acknowledging who does the work and who collects the profits should also give us pause. The reminder of kinder options could give us hope. Olivia Laing’s personal experiences remind us that we do turn to gardening in moments of stress and fear and that it does help us weather the difficult bits.
As usual, should you want to learn more, a great place to start is the author’s website.
I had found this link on her website to a 3:40 video of her in her home. Not so much the gardens, but it is a sort of intimate peek into her life with her husband, Ian. Since my initial poking around, she has updated her website and, while I could no longer find that specific link, there are all manner of links to interviews and essays. It’s definitely worth a good browse!
In conversation with Olivia Laing and Jeremy Deller (1:01:35). From the youtube page: “In this special talk at William Morris Gallery, Olivia Laing, Jeremy Deller and Hadrian Garrard, Gallery Director, discuss Morris’s utopian vision and what it means in our own century of late capitalism and ecological catastrophe.” It’s always nice to include at least one or two clips of the author speaking to the topics of the book. Laing is not the only speaker here but it’s quite appropriate that it’s at the William Morris Gallery as she wrote quite a bit about Morris in the book.
The garden Laing is restoring was designed by Mark Rumary, a formerly well-known British plantsman. Rather interestingly, at this point in time, typing HIS name in a search engine takes you directly to Olivia Laing. He was, however, the author of two books: Xeriscaping and The Dry Garden. Both seem quite appropriate for our climate and both, I think, are in the CAGC Library. And, if not, I have surely seen copies on the sale rack at the Council Garden Shop! Nonetheless, I couldn’t find much of anything about him beyond what Laing described in her book.
Her restored garden has been featured on a number of tours. Some images from a Garden Museum sponsored tour may be found here.
Artists, poets, and gardens seem often to be intertwined. And Laing braids them through her book. The ones that stuck most in my mind were Milton and John Clare. In the course of our discussion, several of us (mea culpa) confessed that we had never actually read Paradise Lost. Thanks to the Gutenberg Project, you can now download the book for free.
I was not familiar with John Clare (1793-1864) but Laing elaborates on his life. He lived at the transition point to the Industrial Revolution and so his work describes the end of the agrarian life that had characterized the British lower classes for so many years. I showed this short 7:16 clip showing a bit about his life and some of his poetry. Although we didn’t watch it, there is a longer history (47:50) here if you want to learn more about this unusual man.
With slightly overlapping lives, William Morris (1834-1896) was another important historical figure for Laing with his efforts to return to a simpler, more practical life. Here is a 12:21 clip of Morris’ Standen House. And, this 56:56 lecture describes the gardens of the arts and crafts movement (1880-1920) more generally.
In more contemporary times, Derek Jarman (1942-1994) pushed the concept of a garden even further, envisioning a seamless blending of the cultivated with the wild. No fences or hedges creating clear delineations. A film director with an HIV diagnosis in the days when that was both socially unacceptable and a death sentence, he bought a small cottage on a shingle near a nuclear power station and created his postmodern garden. Here are two articles about it:
https://artuk.org/discover/stories/derek-jarmans-garden-a-heart-of-creativity
https://www.gardenvisit.com/gardens/derek_jarman_garden_prospect_cottage_dungeness
But these arts and crafts and more recent postmodern gardens followed years of the more formal, extensive landscapes of the major British gardens. Such gardens represented an entire restructuring of the land with villages moved so the estate owners could have an unimpeded view to the horizon. Capability Brown is the architect most associated with these monumental works, many of which do still exist today. This 2:36 video provides an overview of some of his most well-known projects. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcwhvJc-sSk
While not specifically Brown gardens, this website includes images of many of the National Trust estates and gardens: .
Although built after Brown, the Middleton family owned several mansions including the Middleton Place in South Carolina. They employed landscape designers to create similar landscapes. This website shows the extensive work done to reshape the land.
With her research into the gardens of this era and specifically those of the Middleton family, Laing addressed the issues of where the money came from to build such magnificent landscapes. And the answer is often from the slave trade and other forms of exploitation with the enslaved people or free but minimally paid people doing the work.
While she loves her own garden and the work that has gone into it, she recognizes it as an Eden, as a place to turn when the world is difficult. At the same time, she leaves us with the question of the true price of a garden and who has the resources to create and enjoy such privileged spaces.