A private sanctuary that is open to all
THE GARDEN AGAINST TIME In search of a common paradise
OLIVIA LAING 336pp. Picador. £20.
IT’S AN ILL WIND that blows nobody any good, and the Covid-19 lockdowns accordingly produced their share of winners. Among those who enjoyed a florid commercial season were the makers of gym equipment, of craft materials and of sex toys; but the ones whose business expanded beyond all expectations were the nurserymen and garden supply companies, who sold millions of bulbs and seedlings, and mountains of well-rotted horse manure, to those who were lucky enough to have a garden in which to employ them. Some of these quantities were destined for the Suffolk home of the writer and cultural commentator Olivia Laing, who found herself in possession, for the first time, of an overgrown but well-constructed garden, originally designed by Mark Rumary. As she watched it unfold beneath the miraculous bubble of high pressure that settled over these islands then, she began to clear, and make notes, and to read and re-read about gardens. This book – part memoir, part polemic, part garden history and part gardenmaking – is the outcome.
The gardening text that seemed urgently to present itself was Milton’s Paradise Lost, an alwaystopical work she experienced as “propelled by an almost intolerable need to understand what it means to have failed and what one ought to do once failure has occurred … maybe this is why it felt compelling to read in our own season of turmoil … First there was Brexit, and with it the global rise of the far right. Then Trump was elected president, and every single day more of the cherished assumptions were crushed into the ground”. As she reads on, however, the story becomes more problematic. Whose side is Milton on? How can this be paradise when Adam and Eve are there only on sufferance? Is it an imperialist story? Is the rebel Satan a coloniser on behalf of Hell, or is that God, with Eden as his colonial project and Adam and Eve as “indentured slaves”? These are not new questions, but troubling for someone who likes to know whose side she should be on herself. As for the horticultural aspect, the model is unencouraging: it’s evident by Book Four that the garden is getting on top of the first couple; which is why they split up, with consequences that are well documented.
Nevertheless, Paradise Lost deserves its place as the presiding motif of the book. The failure Laing speaks of was, of course, the English Commonwealth, Milton having been of Cromwell’s party. She reads it from a modern, secular perspective as the work of a rebel writing, in the ruins of his hopes, against rebellion and in favour of the divine sovereign power he had sought to overthrow. In this rea
