While a cast of literary heavyweights grace Laing’s account of her garden restoration, the real joys lie in her detailed description of the pruning and the planting and the soothing effect on her state of mind
Olivia Laing’s new book, The Garden Against Time, is as fragrantly replete as a long border at its peak. The word that comes to mind is spumy: a blossomy, brimful excess that’s almost too much at times. Here are hundreds of plants, exquisitely described; here is colour, energy and expertise. In a way, it’s akin to a garden itself; a place, almost a park, in which the reader never quite knows what’s around the next corner. But while this is invigorating – my imagination whirred across the verdant expanses of its pages like some crazy, old-fashioned lawnmower – it’s also tiring. Dizzy on its pollen, I often had to put it down. I began to think of the chapter breaks as conveniently placed benches on which I might for a while sit quietly, temporarily unassailed by endless common names, ongoing worries about honey fungus, and long disquisitions on privilege and exclusion.
Laing does two things at once. First and foremost, this book is a memoir, in which she describes her restoration of the garden attached to the house in Suffolk to which she moved in 2020, as Covid-19 raged on and so many of us sought respite in our backyards, balconies and window boxes (in the course of 2020, more than 3 million people in Britain began to garden for the first time, nearly half of them under 45). All her life, she has longed for a garden to call her own – one she would never have to give up on the whim of some landlord – and now, at last, she has one, bought with her husband, a retired Cambridge don. The work originally of a designer called Mark Rumary who liked hedges and ponds, this third of an acre cannot be seen in its entirety all at once, appearing instead as a series of secretive rooms; a beguiling prospect for a woman who read Frances Hodgson Burnett’s marvellous novel The Secret Garden as a child.
