Lush, Reciprocal Entanglements

Manjula Martin explores the hidden costs and radical potential of humanity’s enduring hobby in Olivia Laing’s “The Garden Against Time.”

By Manjula MartinJuly 25, 2024

• Memoir & Essay

• Nonfiction

• Environment

IN THE SPRING of 2020, the Antiguan American author and gardener Jamaica Kincaid wrote, “I have not been making a garden so much as having a conversation with the idea of the garden.” Of course, Kincaid has been making a garden, for decades now; the flower beds surrounding her Vermont home are literal, not figurative. But Kincaid, a grande dame of horticulture writing, is more aware than most gardeners that the ongoing dialogue she has with her hobby is also a conversation with history, empire, identity, and language. Perhaps this is why books about gardens appeal not only to hobbyists but also to readers who have never actually set foot to spade: the story of a garden is an excellent way to put language to the tangled relationships between humans and land, nature and artifice, exploitation and care.

Most garden stories stem from Eden or its equivalent. British author Olivia Laing’s latest book, The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise (2024), interweaves garden memoir with cultural criticism to explore both the ugly history and the revolutionary potential of trying to create paradise on earth. If, as Laing observes, the evergreen human obsession with gardens is an effort to reclaim the keys to Eden, access remains difficult. From wartime kitchen gardens to sweeping English manor grounds to potted tomatoes on fire escapes, gardens typically present themselves as places of beauty and refuge. But, Laing writes, “[t]he story of the garden has from its Edenic beginning always also been a story about what or who is excluded or cast out, from types of plants to types of people.” Laing’s declared mission is “to count the cost of building paradise, but also to peer into the past and see if [she] could find versions of Eden that weren’t founded on exclusion and exploitation, that might harbor ideas that could be vital in the difficult years ahead.”

The Garden Against Time is the result of those efforts. It’s a book about the idea of a garden. It’s also a book about the making of one.

To that end, Laing’s story begins and concludes in her own backyard—a walled garden in a historic house in Suffolk that Laing and her spouse, the poet Ian Patterson, bought during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Theirs is the former home of Mark Rumary, an English garden designer and author who worked with Notcutts, a legendary Suffolk nursery. Rumary, who died in 2010, planted the garden beginning in the 1960s, when he and his partner, the composer Derek Melville, moved in. By the time Laing fell in love with it, the garden was buried in weeds.

Rumary’s garden isn’t your average fire-escape tomato. Although the lot is a modest third of an acre, Laing explains that “it felt much larger,” thanks in part to hedges that created “rooms”—outdoor spaces differentiated by plantings, aesthetics, and microclimates. Some of Rumary’s plantings were grown from cuttings taken in auspicious locales: the fig, for instance, was from Vita Sackville-West’s storied garden at Sissinghurst, and the spotted laurel had been cut from Chopin’s grave. There were “pinks [grown] from seed gathered in George Sand’s garden.” Back in the day, royals were said to have dropped in occasionally for tea.

Laing’s garden might strike an everyday hobbyist as posh. It struck me that way the first time I saw it, in a 2021 spread in The New York Times Style Magazine. But the way Laing chooses to frame her garden’s story seems intended to challenge the popular conception of gardening as a leisurely pursuit of ladies who lunch and low-stakes HGTV (or BBC) reality shows. Gardens are more meaningful, more powerful, than we might recognize. They hold history in their bodies, just as people do.

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I began reading The Garden Against Time in early June. I was in a hammock in my own garden, which shares a half acre of land with my house in coastal Northern California. It was afternoon; fog was rolling in, and the redwood trees that surround my home were drinking it. The dahlias were just coming on, the roses almost done with their first flush. As I read, I set the book down from time to time and looked up at the giant trees. Two hummingbirds—Anna and Alan—held an intergalactic chase scene high in the canopy. Time seemed, as it always does in the garden, to redefine itself on terms independent of human influence. The garden felt cozy, rich with possibility. Every flower seemed comfortably fuzzy, as though Vaseline had been gently rubbed across the lens of my world.

This tableau, too, might look posh to others. Inevitably, the photos I post of my garden online don’t reflect my entire point of view: some days, all I see when I look at these flower beds is the work that still needs to be done. There’s a pile of dead vegetation in the corner, wild sweet peas and invasive blackberry pulled in a futile effort to stop them strangling the other plants. The dozens of rosebushes are full of cucumber beetles. Dahlias droop before they have a chance to bloom; the earwigs have eaten their share. The Meyer lemon—the only citrus it’s hot enough to grow here—has that weird fungus again that makes the lemons drop before they’re ripe. In the kitchen is a wooden bowl full of tiny green lemons we’ll never use.

Each garden means something different to its gardener. For me, this garden is a way to be in direct relationship with the ecosystem in which I live. It’s a place where my body, which is often in pain, feels capable of navigating the complex cycles of struggle between humans and the elements. And it is where I find beauty, which I need in order to survive. I have stood in my garden while it rained, while wind toppled redwood branches large as trees themselves, while it snowed ash from the wildfires that come closer and closer each time. I call it “my” garden, but it’s not. Beneath the dirt that grows the tiny lemons is bedrock that has been bought and stolen, flooded and burned. This place has had many names. It is because of the land’s history, much of it ugly, that I was swinging in that hammock. And it’s because history is so inextricably connected to the natural world that I and others, people like Laing, choose to write about plants.

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The Garden Against Time is loosely structured around a year’s worth of entries in Laing’s gardening journal. Woven through the seasons are deep dives into gardens’ role in (mostly British) history. Stuck at home during the COVID-19 lockdown, Laing set herself the task of excavating the evidence of care beneath the ruins of Rumary’s garden. Laing wasn’t new to gardening in 2020, but she was new to homeownership, housing stability, marriage—the benefits and trappings behind many garden walls. From the outset, she values her new/old garden as a means of connection, not escape: “While the spell of a garden does lie in its suspension, its seeming separation, from the larger world, the idea that it exists outside of history or politics is not a possibility.”

Laing begins her research, naturally, with Milton’s Paradise Lost. I’ve written and read quite a lot about gardening, but I have never read Paradise Lost—a fact that embarrassed me until, 40 pages in, Laing discloses that she’s never read it. She then proceeds to do so, inviting the reader into a delightfully close reading of the epic poem, with a focus on the Eden bits. From there, Laing digs into history to discover some of the other shapes an earthly paradise might take.

Grounding the narrative is the ugly history of the garden as property as delineated in the Inclosure Acts, British laws that enabled a massive land grab beginning in the 1600s and lasting through the 19th century, converting formerly public land into private estates for the ultra-wealthy. In this context, Laing revisits the utopian efforts of early communards in her own region. This history dovetails into the story of renowned 19th-century designer William Morris, whose garden-influenced aesthetics were inseparable from his socialist politics. Via archival research, subsequent chapters travel to irruptions of wildflowers in post-Blitz London and wartime gardens in 1940s Italy and 2016 Syria. Touching on themes from Everybody: A Book About Freedom, Laing’s 2021 study of freedom and embodiment, as well as drawing on the author’s childhood, a pivotal chapter focuses on the reclamation of bodily pleasure evident in the gardens of queer artists Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines (early 20th century) and Derek Jarman (the 1980s).

Laing possesses a low-key but vigorous sense of curiosity, and she is drawn to nuance and coincidence. Her authorial expertise is in the slow accrual of micro-attentions that, first loosely and then loudly, coalesce into the universal—from Eden to hell and back again. Her books, though always topical, are not hot takes; they are slow, restorative meanders through a nominal theme (Laing has previously written cultural histories of bodily freedom, loneliness, art during repressive times, the literary topography of drinking, and the river in which Virginia Woolf drowned herself). The author sometimes saunters off the main path, following side trails cut by research and personal happenstance, but she rarely gets lost. And there’s no living writer with whom I’d rather ramble through the English countryside. In The Garden Against Time, the looping narrative threads function not unlike those of mycelial networks, uncovering hidden connections and acting as conduits for author and reader alike.

Through it all, Laing gardens: she gardens in grief for her stepmother’s death, through the anxiety of her father’s subsequent health problems and housing insecurity, and from within the ambient collective sorrows of life in a world that seems to be turning ever more hostile, away from paradise.

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Laing’s narrative of making a garden is diaristic, anchored in current events. By contrast, the ideas of “the garden” that she investigates are largely rooted in the scholarly past. This presents a bit of a source problem. To the victors go the archives; while moneyed white men by no means constitute the majority of people yearning for paradise, they do make up the bulk of the research materials available on the topic. As I pored over Laing’s endnotes, I grew increasingly aware of an additional narrative thread at work, one that raised questions. What stories aren’t written in canonical poems or published in the tracts of failed middle-class utopias? Whose letters get saved and cataloged, set down as history?

Vitally, the book does contextualize and interrogate some of the historical dead-white-dude antics. Laing unearths the history of poet John Clare, a fan of Milton’s and a contemporary of Keats’s—that rare poet of the working class who shows up in the archives, a white man from a farming family who was torn from the land he loved by the process of inclosure. Clare didn’t have money, but he had a real connection to the natural world, an authenticity that writers like Milton might have envied. (Clare’s unimpressed opinion of the new Linnean plant names embraced by many Enlightenment-era writers and thinkers: He calls it “the hard nicknamy system of unuterable words.”)

Laing writes that Clare’s work and tragic life are “a true testament to what plants can mean, how they can root and steady a person” and a “testament too to the damage that is done when the relationship between people and the land is severed, deliberately and for the purpose of profit.” Clare found some success as a writer but never possessed land of his own. He also struggled with his mental health and experienced visions—flowers spoke to him. He was first institutionalized in 1837, and remained so on and off (but mostly on) until his death in 1864. Laing relates how, from that terrible, enclosed space, torn from the fields he so loved, the poet penned a letter to his son Charles: “[H]ow do you get on with the Flowers,” Clare asks, breaking my heart.

In another devastating set piece, Laing visits a nearby estate, Shrubland Hall, the former seat of a family of robber barons called the Middletons. Beginning in the 1700s, the Middletons created vast, lavish gardens at Shrubland, a pursuit that Laing compares to the Sacklers funding the arts in order “to elevate themselves, to rise above the degraded and exploitative sources of their wealth.” It worked: Prince Albert once visited. But Laing has questions, foremost among them: “[W]here does the money come from?”

In tracking the Middletons from the 1600s to the 1800s, Laing demonstrates how British participation in the chattel slavery economy in the Caribbean and North America directly funded English estate gardens of the era. Those idyllic English gardens, the sweeping vistas of hedges and bubbling fountains familiar to any lover of Jane Austen or Bridgerton (2020– ), were built by stolen labor, stolen bodies, stolen lives. As Laing reminds us, the noun plantation was also a verb, in which the literal act of planting was used as a tactic of colonialism. At the close of the chapter, Laing lists the handful of names she was able to track down of the people who built the Middleton family’s fortunes in South Carolina and back home—among them “Bob and Winter, who worked on the gardens” against their will.

As this keystone chapter about the important connections between gardens and exploitative capitalism concluded, I found myself wanting more. Money wasn’t the only thing colonizers like the Middletons brought back to the old country, nor was this kind of cross-pollination limited to the era during which human beings like Bob and Winter were targeted and kidnapped for their expertise. The cultures of colonized peoples will always migrate back to the colonizing power in some form, whether stolen, given, or reclaimed—a transplantation, if you will. Diasporic horticulture was and is an enduring influence on the art and science of gardening (and on culture as a whole) in the United Kingdom, the United States, and just about every empire that ever empired.

There is a story we tell ourselves about beauty—that it is worth the pain. But true, abidingly resplendent beauty lies in the fact that, despite such harms, in the face of them, even against them, we continue to seek a better world—“a dream that is carried in the heart: a fertile garden, time and space enough for all of us.”

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Laing’s savvy question—“where does the money come from?”—is a driving inquiry of the book’s early chapters. Such transparency of economy doesn’t always extend to the author’s own resources. As a gardener myself, I have a sense of how much money it takes to buy large quantities of flower starts, compost, and other garden essentials—not to mention how much sweat equity. Upon my first reading of the book, there were several scenes in the author’s garden for which my marginalia consisted merely of a penciled-in “$$$?!”

Still, while Laing may not share where her money comes from or how she finds the time to build an actual pond, the intimate moments when she collapses the historical into the personal and allows herself to become vulnerable have stuck in my mind like rose thorns. Laing shares her own experiences of refuge and displacement through the lenses of personal grief, political anger, and the trauma of internalized homophobia. Just as Eden is only one version of a garden, a memoir does not, need not, show an entire life. And the author is clear about which side of the garden gate she’s on. She stands with the dispossessed—the underdogs, weirdos, and rebels who have time and again struggled to remake the relationships between people and the land. There’s something revolutionary about the idea that a garden can be a private place, an island of beauty and respite, while also being, at the same time, a component of a larger archipelago of ideas, in which land is used and tended with care, by and for the public good.

In the de facto climax of the memoir plotline, Laing readies her garden for an open house. It’s part of a nationwide fundraiser for the National Health Service (NHS), in which members of the public pay a small fee to visit private gardens and have tea. It’s early June. Many of her flowers have not yet come on. In perhaps the most HGTV moment of the book, Laing runs around in a planting frenzy, trying frantically to fill out the beds. She pulls it off. A small party assembles in the garden, attended by friends and people who knew Rumary, and Laing remarks that “it was probably the best day of [her] life: just for the feeling of looking in and seeing the garden so full of people, talking to each other, making themselves at home.” The writer is aware that the scene is a far cry from Morris’s imagined socialist revolution. But it’s something to nurture, something that might grow.

In a sense, the kinds of conversations and community-making Laing experienced that day are already bearing fruit. The Garden Against Time joins a recent wave of books by nonbinary people and women writing about their personal relationships with the natural world amid the larger context of the climate crisis: Camille Dungy’s Soil: The Story of a Black Mother’s Garden (2023), Emily Raboteau’s Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against “the Apocalypse” (2024), Sabrina Imbler’s How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures (2022), Marchelle Farrell’s Uprooting: From the Caribbean to the Countryside—Finding Home in an English Country Garden (2023), and my own garden memoir–cum–natural history published earlier this year, to name just a few. I think we’re all of us interested in the different ways in which, despite humanity’s best/worst efforts, the more-than-human-world still carries and exerts power in people’s lives: how our bodies are also natural bodies. The mycelial networks are doing their job.

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By the time I sat down to write this review, my garden had turned ominous. The hammock swung empty; the region was in the grips of yet another heat dome, formerly called a heat wave, and it was too hot outside to spend time there. In the early mornings, my partner and I ran around delivering emergency water supplies to the zinnia starts a friend had given us. The roses, now done with their first flush, were struggling to muster up another round.

The warming that threatens my garden is a crisis of the Anthropocene, but the genus Rosa is at least 35 million years old. It likely originated as a wildflower somewhere in Asia, and eventually came to the modern-day garden via the Middle East, the Greek Empire, the Roman Empire, the French Empire, et cetera and ad infinitum. Many more millions of years ago, the redwoods that tower above my rose beds were once native to multiple continents, until climatic changes pushed them into smaller habitat ranges. They now live only in the Western United States; the current crisis may force them to migrate again, or perish. The ancestors of my garden-variety dahlias were a favorite cultivar of the ancient Aztec Empire, in what is now Mexico. Native thimbleberry, which grows wild all over my yard, has for the past 10,000 years or more been used as food and medicine by Pomo and Coast Miwok people, who tended this land as a garden until it was stolen from them by people who can be traced—if one follows the money—all the way up to me.

Laing’s book also ends in a heat wave, amid a drought and water shortages in East Anglia. Laing makes the terrible decision to let plants die, unable to stomach the privilege of throwing water on the ground when others don’t have it to drink: “One of the most horrifying aspects of those weeks was seeing the garden become another manifestation of selfishness, a private luxury at a shared cost, rather than a place that ran counter to the world’s more toxic drives.” Like the weather, a garden is both personal and political. It occupies an ever-changing role amid the systems that created it—climate, empire, desire, a big bang.

I suspect The Garden Against Time is the kind of book that will continue to bloom in the minds of readers as it ages, revealing new connections each time it’s picked up. If there’s a slender thread in the book, it’s perhaps the titular one. Time itself is never an explicit focus of Laing’s research; instead, it hovers around the periphery of her excavation sites, lurking beneath history and horticulture. Laing touches repeatedly on the idea of a garden as “a time capsule,” whether in the literal form of heirloom varietals or as a pursuit that connects one to the past. However, she never really throws her (significant) academic muscle behind the suggestion that a garden challenges or disrupts time. In some ways, her approach fits the nature of time: it’s slippery, even when it’s working on your side.

Perhaps a garden doesn’t stand against time so much as it becomes a conduit, ferrying the humans who tend it between eras and experiences that bind us more strongly to the systems and cycles of this great green world—and to the plants and animals with whom we share our home. In a time of forced binaries and ubiquitous oversimplification in mainstream culture and public thought, I’m thankful for seekers like Laing, those who insist upon the possibility of more lush, reciprocal entanglements between people and the land—a garden as “a covenant of how the world should be and might again.” I hope they find it. I hope we all do.

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Featured image: The garden of Manjula Martin. Courtesy of Manjula Martin.