THE GARDEN AGAINST TIME

I was hanging out for the release of this book. I love Olivia Laing’s writing, I love gardens and gardening, I’d read the reviews (poetry and literature and history and digging holes and watching the green spikes of unexpected bulbs, right up my garden path) and I fully expected to love The Garden Against Time.
Well, I liked it.

It’s not that it fell flat, or was not up to Laing’s usual standard. Olivia Laing is a master of the art of intertwining. In the books I’ve read (To the River, The Trip to Echo Springs, The Lonely City, Everybody) she weaves memoir, literature, history, biography, sociology and politics with acute and often poetic observations of her environment. Rebecca Solnit is another writer who does this beautifully, but I especially enjoy Laing’s Englishness.

In this case – and it could just be that the broken-ness of the world is pressing down more than usual on my heart – it was all too much. I know that the slave trade funded many of the great country estates and their lavish gardens. I know about whole villages being demolished so His Lordship could have an uninterrupted view. I know that having a garden is an unimaginable privilege for millions. Or billions.

There was also lot I didn’t know – about John Milton and John Clare and many of the other writers and topics she introduced, and I read with interest. I agree with Laing that in a perfect world, a garden – a plot of earth, a green space, somewhere beautiful, somewhere productive –  would be a right, not the preserve of wealth or inherited privilege. But when I garden, I seek the moment, not time past. The sun on my face, the sound of a bird, the sensation of roots letting go – or not – as I pull a weed. Laing, when she actually concentrates on her own garden-making – the hands in the dirt, the dreaming and planning and watching – writes like an angel and I’m there with her. With her time, labour, love and, it has to be said, pots of money, we read along as a neglected but once lovely garden comes to life. It’s a bit The Secret Garden, and it’s what I was there for, not the other stuff, Philistine that I am.

I’ve seen photographs of Laing in among the greenery in a glossy British gardening magazine, and it’s a gorgeous bit of Paradise. My own is scruffy and weedy, a perpetual work in progress, a tussle with time and lack of it, with my ageing body and the changing climate. At the beginning of year, I had the thought that I would enjoy my garden more if I could only get on top of it. And it hit me that I was never going to get on top of it, ever.

So I should just enjoy it. And I do.