The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise

ISBN: 0393882004

Author: Laing, Olivia

Condition: Used

Finalist for the 2024 Kirkus Prize for NonfictionFinalist for the 2024 Wainwright Prize for Nature WritingA #1 Sunday Times (UK) BestsellerA New York Times Book Review Editors' ChoiceAn Oprah Daily Summer Reading RecommendationInspired by the restoration of her own garden, "imaginative and empathetic critic" (NPR) Olivia Laing embarks on an exhilarating investigation of paradise.In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore an eighteenth-century walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work brought to light a crucial question for our age: Who gets to live in paradise, and how can we share it while theres still time? Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Miltons Paradise Lost to John Clares enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Laing interrogates the sometimes shocking cost of making paradise on earth.But the story of the garden doesnt always enact larger patterns of privilege and exclusion. Its also a place of rebel outposts and communal dreams. From the improbable queer utopia conjured by Derek Jarman on the beach at Dungeness to the fertile vision of a common Eden propagated by William Morris, new modes of living can and have been attempted amidst the flower beds, experiments that could prove vital in the coming era of climate change. The result is a humming, glowing tapestry, a beautiful and exacting account of the abundant pleasures and possibilities of gardens: not as a place to hide from the world but as a site of encounter and discovery, bee-loud and pollen-laden. 9 illustrations