Olivia Laing takes us to her happy place – her garden
The author celebrates the sheer joy of having her own plot, but also digs a little deeper, writes Max Liu
The Garden Against Time by Olivia Laing, Picador, £20
At the beginning of her sixth work of nonfiction, which is about how she bought a house in Suffolk in 2020 and spent two years restoring its walled garden, Olivia Laing wants you to know that she knows she is lucky.
“I came to home ownership late, renting until I was 40,” she writes before explaining that she was able to buy the Suffolk house due to “a surge of good fortune” which involved falling in love with and marrying the poet Ian Patterson who shared her enthusiasm for gardening. Presumably, it was also down to Laing publishing a string of well-received books in her thirties and early-forties, perhaps most famously for her experimental novel Crudo (2018).
Laing acquired her lifelong passion for gardens in unhappy circumstances.
“Many people have lost a paradise,” she writes in a passage about how, when she was at primary school in Buckinghamshire the 1980s, her mother was outed as gay. “It was impossible to stay in our village or school and we ended up moving to a new town hundreds of miles away…”
Her parents had split up a few years before and, at weekends, her father would take her to visit National Trust houses where she was enraptured by the plants and flowers in their gardens.
In her twenties, she trained to become a herbalist and recalls: “The study of botany was an education in looking.” She 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 her new book, writing about her garden with a vigour that should carry even the least green-fingered reader: “It was at its most beautiful in the early mornings and just before sunset, when the low sun filtered through the enclosing green walls of the hornbeam hedge, illuminating the chequered fritillaries, with
Laing’s vigour should carry even the least greenfingered reader
their foxed purple skins, so they looked like the shining forms in a Turkish carpet.”
Laing is often at her best when she is raging against injustice. In The Lonely City she wrote about homophobia and the way that prejudice shaped attitudes to Aids victims in the 1980s. Here she examines power structures through the less likely subject of gardens which, in Britain, were historically connected to empire and enclosure and today symbolise a status quo that sees half of the country owned by less than one per cent of its population.
Laing has always been a
precise and striking stylist, but her prose is less pruned in The Garden Against Time than in previous books. She
nd sounds relaxed and playful, describing how her garden became “floriferous and floppy, a sweetshop of foxgloves and lupins, Russell Hybrids in Quality Street maroons and purples that clashed happily with the soft new plumes of wisteria”.
She intersperses her account of transforming her own garden with mini-essays on the writers she read during this period, including John Milton, William Morris and Derek Jarman, whose Modern Nature (1991) was about creating a garden at Dungeness after he was diagnosed as HIV positive.
Laing used this formula – combining her own story with critiques of relevant artists and thinkers – in earlier works and, for the most part, it is effective. Near the end, however, The Garden Against Time becomes disjointed with an excursion to wartime Italy which feels tacked on. Sometimes too the connections between Laing’s emotions and world events come off forced.
“I’d been thinking so much about war and then on 24 February Russia invaded Ukraine…” she writes, a little glibly.
But these are minor quibbles about a wise and enthralling book which you should read this spring in the garden, if you’re lucky enough to have one.