British writer Olivia Laing’s recent book, ‘The Garden Against Time’, examines that seemingly most innocent of pursuits, creating a garden, in a variety of contexts, thus rooting out some not-so-innocent associations. She and her partner, a retired academic/poet, Ian Patterson, purchase a property in Suffolk, south-east England, with a large neglected plot, designed and established by deceased plant aficionado, Mark Rummary. Laing, herself a gardening guru and practising herbalist, aspires to bring Rummary’s garden back to life. His original was conceived, amongst other matters, as a set of discreet individual spaces, like different rooms in a house, which metaphorically fits Laing’s design throughout this book of sequentially focussing on individual moral, cultural and historical aspects of The Garden, meanwhile incorporating somewhat irrelevant personal memoir.
Laing is a modern moralist, keen to anatomise the manifold sins of western capitalist consumerist society along with those rapacious individuals who over time have built this entity and presently enable it. Fine and dandy, but since Privilege is one of Laing’s many bête noires here, I couldn’t help but notice early on and throughout , except for a brief diversion at the end (also allowing that this is largely set in the year of Covid), Laing doesn’t seem to need to do any paid work, and has apparently deep pockets when it comes to re-creating Rummary’s vision, prolifically purchasing flowers, shrubs and trees, importing in topsoil and hiring various tradesmen for tasks big and small. Not that I don’t wish it were myself, I also possess a large garden and one of the many charms of this book, like in shows such as ‘Grand Designs’, is imagining what one might do with one’s own neglected spaces if one had sufficient time and means, like Laing.
So we progress: through an analysis of the garden as Paradise, referencing poet John Milton, followed by the garden as planned parkland, the 18th century enclosures with attendant misery and dispossession, referencing poet John Clare, then the far greater misery and horror of the slave trade that financially underpinned many of the aristocratic estates, leading on to the projects of colonisation (particularly pertinent to an Australian reader), then William Morris, the garden as utopia, as societal retreat, etcetera, all absorbingly brought to life with various historical figures. Meanwhile, Laing is herself selecting, planting and building her own little Eden. She cites British filmmaker Derek Jarman as an inspiration, his memoir ‘Modern Nature’, and writer W.G. Sebald, both in moral concerns and narrative form, Laing freely acknowledging Sebald’s influence, noting her part of England is also that which he traversed and contemplated in ‘The Rings of Saturn’.
Towards the close we have a vivid recounting of a rich American/Italian heiress, Iris Origo, along with her aristo husband, their sympathetic management of a huge estate, La Foce, with its many villages, parks, woodlands, through the period of Mussolini’s rise, World War Two and afterwards. Laing’s point with this particular story, which she hammers home rather insistently, is that despite this couple’s humanitarianism, generosity and even selfless bravery, they always remain blind to the fact that they basically own their villagers, and are unpleasantly surprised when, post-war, these people, for whom they have done so much, nevertheless demand their political rights.
I mention Laing’s insistence here for it started to get on my nerves, because of the one minor cavil I have with this otherwise excellent book and, I suppose, with the author herself.
This particular summer of Laing’s, England suffers a mini-drought. Climate change is arraigned as part culprit, but sensibly, any place any time might be subject to a stretch of unusually dry weather. And it seems East Anglia is ‘the driest region of the country’ receiving ‘around half the annual rainfall’. So armed with this foreknowledge, what does Laing do? Plan and plant a totally inappropriate garden for the given landscape, because she wishes to re-create the original ideal of a man she much admires, Rummary, but also because this is the garden that she herself wants to make. So then she watches on in dismay as her dream wilts away. She stands by agonising over whether she should just ‘turn on the tap’, but of course, ecologically principled, as in all matters, she cannot bring herself to do this. So she suffers as her beloved plants suffer. And then they die.
When rains do eventually arrive, a few perk up, and so Laing indulges in manic bout of replanting. But it seems no obvious lesson has been learnt, which is: if Laing had from the start created a garden that fitted the landscape, was adapted to it, she could then have watched on as her plants and flowers drooped a little in the dry, in the secure knowledge that they would all revive in due course. Because they are natives.
So it would seem that Laing herself, albeit in a minor way, has also tried to mould a world to how she would wish it to be, a natural human desire, but with inevitably destructive results, a thing that in this instance, like the colonists, like the Italian aristos, even with the best of intentions, she also seems blind to.