Olivia Laing : The Garden Against Time

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. Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton’s Paradise Lost to Dereck Jarman at Dungeness via William Morris Laing interrogates the sometimes shocking cost of making paradise on earth.
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.
Olivia Laing is a widely acclaimed writer and critic. She’s the author of seven books, including The Lonely City, Everybody and Funny Weather. Her work has been translated into twenty-two languages and in 2018 she was awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction.