The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise traces Olivia Laing's restoration of a walled Suffolk garden into a far-reaching inquiry into who paradise has historically been built for — and at what cost.
About This Book
Beginning with the physical labour of reclaiming an overgrown walled garden in Suffolk, Laing moves outward into centuries of contested ground. Paradise, she argues, is never simply botanical — it is political. The book ranges across Milton's Paradise Lost, John Clare's enclosure elegies, a wartime sanctuary in Italy, and an aristocratic pleasure garden funded by slavery, reading each as evidence of paradise's entanglement with privilege and exclusion. Against these, Laing assembles counter-histories: Derek Jarman's queer coastal utopia at Dungeness, William Morris's vision of a common Eden. For readers interested in landscape, literature, and the politics of space, this is a searching account of what gardens actually enact — and what they might yet become.
Key Features
- 336 pages of essayistic prose weaving garden history, literary criticism, and ecological thought
- Published by Pan Macmillan UK, 2020
What You'll Discover
- How the history of garden-making is inseparable from enclosure, slavery, and the concentration of wealth — from aristocratic pleasure grounds to Milton's fallen Eden
- Derek Jarman's garden at Dungeness as an improbable queer utopia, constructed in defiance of convention on a shingle beach
- William Morris's propagation of a common Eden as a model for collective, democratic approaches to landscape and living
- How gardens might function not as retreats from the world but as sites of encounter, experiment, and relevance to the coming era of climate change
About the Author
Olivia Laing is a British writer known for works that move between cultural criticism, biography, and personal essay. Her writing consistently examines art, landscape, and the social conditions that shape both.
Specifications
- Format: Hardcover
- Pages: 336
- Dimensions: 22.3 x 14.6 x 3.4 cm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9781529066678
- Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK
- Publication Date: 2020
Perfect For: Landscape architects, garden designers, and readers drawn to the intersections of ecology, literary history, and the politics of public and private space.