Olivia Laing on unearthing the sinister secrets of gardens

"Inside a garden is a very rich place to think about politics and society.”

It’s the last week of February and Olivia Laing’s enchanting walled garden behind their Georgian house in Suffolk is filled with signs of the coming spring: a budding magnolia; a daphne tree in fragrant flower; a beacon of a bright red anemone just unfurling into bloom.

The current garden was originally laid out from the 1960s by a previous resident—the distinguished award-winning gardener Mark Rumary—but then fell into a state of neglect for some years before Laing and their husband, author and Forward-Prize winning poet Ian Patterson, moved there in 2020 and began to restore it. “More than anything I wanted this garden to be mine,” writes Laing of seeing it for the first time. The beguiling story of its restoration provides a kind of supporting trellis for the many branching themes of Laing’s new book, The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise.

“I loved gardens right from the beginning,” Laing tells me, curled into a chair in their yellow sitting room which looks out over the garden. “My earliest memories are of being fascinated by plants as I walked to school and nursery.” And a childhood that was often challenging led to what Laing describes as a “permanent, nagging need for a place that was safe, wild, messy, bountiful and above all, private”.

So now, as the owner of a secret garden completely hidden from the street outside, it would have been easy for Laing to dwell rosily on it as a place of refuge from the world and its messes. Instead they write: “The lockdown… made it painfully apparent that the garden, that supposed sanctuary from the world, was inescapably political”. Accordingly The Garden Against Time challenges us to confront the ways in which gardens have so often failed to be paradises they ought to be by definition. For the very word “paradise”, Laing explains, has its roots in Avestan, a language spoken in Persia 2000 years BCE, and derives from the word pairidaeza which means “walled garden”.

We’re not going to survive the climate emergency unless we completely, drastically rethink our ideas about nature

“Even a walled garden isn’t actually closed and separate from the world because every plant has a long history of cultivation by humans. I wanted to draw correspondences with the much broader history of gardens, how they are created and who has access to them.

“One of the things I was stunned by was that while garden ownership and garden access is more prevalent in Britain compared to other countries, it’s very much along class and race lines. I was writing the book during the pandemic when there were such intense issues around access to public space. The people who owned private space luxuriated in it, and the people who relied on public spaces couldn’t get into them.”

Slavery profits

An even darker side to the creation of private paradises, Laing shows, is the fact that many of this country’s most beautiful gardens, including those at Suffolk stately home Shrubland Hall close to where they live, were financed by immense profits from slavery. Then there were the successive parliamentary enclosure acts in the 18th and 19th centuries that deprived ordinary people of the right to cultivate common land, “creating a landscape of power, stripped of its human element”, as Laing puts it. A prelude, they also point out, to the fact that half of the country is now owned by less than 1% of the population.

But just as private gardens can be shameful or selfish spaces, The Garden Against Time explores how they can also provide us with a metaphor for better ways of living; for creating a paradise open to all. Laing highlights the ideas of such figures as John Milton who in “Paradise Lost” uses the model of horticultural cultivation as a way of considering good government; poet John Clare and his reverence for wild flower species and what we would now call biodiversity; and William Morris who “believed it was everyone’s right to live in beautiful, unspoilt, unpolluted places”.

Says Laing: “I think it’s going to be very interesting doing events for the book this summer and talking about utopian socialism at a time when we’re potentially going to have a change of government. Such ideas are ripe for re-exploring and in fact vitally necessary—we’re not going to survive the climate emergency unless we completely, drastically rethink our ideas about nature.”

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