Olivia Laing’s latest book, The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise , sets the reader an ambitious agenda. Laing asks us to see the garden less as a winsome pastime and more as an unlikely teacher – a powerful model for looking at, sifting through and being in the world – and a place to imagine the world as otherwise. It was in August 2020, at the height of the pandemic, that Laing moved to the Suffolk home that is the floriferous cornerstone of her book.
Its abundant heritage garden had fallen into disrepair but, rather than embark on a wholesale replanting, Laing decided to spend a year waiting and watching to see what had survived. Fig and jasmine, honeysuckle and astrantia, pompom dahlias and a Portland rose rear their glossy heads from starved soil. Each chapter brings a fresh crop of curious nomenclature and luscious similes: gaunt hydrangeas kick up ‘like a chorus line of Giacometti figures’, the boughs of a fastigiate yew ‘stick [.
..] out at rakish angles, like unset bones’.
Olivia Laing’s garden in Suffolk. Photo: © the author What Laing attributes to the 19th-century pastoral poet John Clare is true of her own prose: her eye roves the natural world with ‘besotted precision’. Laing trained as a herbalist and studied botany, a subject which, she reflects, provided an ‘education in looking’.
It’s not hard to see traces of that formation in the book’s descriptions, in which exactitude can be the handmaiden to whimsy: a robini.