Author(s): Olivia Laing

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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 there's still time?

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 costs of making paradise on earth. But amidst larger patterns of privilege and exclusion, she also finds rebel outposts and communal dreams, including Derek Jarman's improbable queer utopia and William Morris's fertile vision of a common Eden. The Garden Against Time is a humming, glowing tapestry, a beautiful and exacting account of the abundant pleasures and possibilities of gardens--not as places to hide from the world but as sites of encounter and discovery, bee-loud and pollen-laden.