THE GARDEN AGAINST TIME

Shortlisted for the 2024 Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing What a wonderful book this is I loved the enchanting and beautifully written story but also the fascinating and thoughtful excursions along the way Nigel Slater A garden contains secrets we all know that buried elements that might put on strange growth or germinate in unexpected places The garden that I chose had walls but like every garden it was interconnected wide open to the world In 2020 Olivia Laing began to restore a walled garden in Suffolk an overgrown Eden of unusual plants The work drew her into an exhilarating investigation of paradise and its long association with gardens Moving between real and imagined gardens from Milton s Paradise Lost to John Clare s 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 doesn t always enact larger patterns of privilege and exclusion It s 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