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 been attempted amidst the flower beds experiments that could
prove vital in the coming era of climate change. The Garden Against Time is 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.
