Reviewed by Jeff Taylor
Olivia Laing (Picador: 2024)
I’ve been a fan of the writer Olivia Laing since attending a Suffolk Book League event in 2015 at which she spoke about her first non-fiction book To The River (Canongate: 2011) which describes her walk along the Ouse, the river in which Virginia Woolf drowned in 1941. Her latest non-fiction book, The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise, was inspired by her taking possession of a walled garden in the Suffolk village of Yoxford in August 2020 during the easing of coronavirus lockdown restrictions. Laing’s walled garden, about a third of an acre, came with Magnolia House, a 16th century Grade II Listed house with Georgian additions. The house had been purchased as a home for Laing and her newish husband, the poet Ian Patterson.
Having taken part possession of a Suffolk garden earlier in 2020, just before the first lockdown, and having a particular interest in Suffolk literature I couldn’t resist buying the hardback copy as soon as it was released.
The Magnolia House garden came with a particular horticultural history described briefly in the estate agent’s blurb: ‘The RHS gardens are a particular feature of the house, laid out by the distinguished gardener Mark Rumary of Notcutts’. Laing confesses that she hadn’t heard of Rumary but knew that Notcutts had often won medals at the Chelsea Flower Show. Rumary had moved into the house in 1961 and constructed his own garden paradise until his death in 2011 after which it was left mostly unattended. From August 2020 Olivia Laing attended to the restoration of this garden with passion and with, what my mother would have called, ‘a few bob’.
The Garden Against Time is partly a memoir of the work she did over about three years and partly an exploration of gardening through 500 years of English culture. I enjoyed both aspects of the book. The former because I identified with her descriptions of the work and planning which goes into gardening, the latter because I learnt much from her cultural diversions.
I’m sure flower gardeners will take much from this book recognising the joy of cultivating such things as pelargoniums, euphorbia and cosmos, pulling up ‘spent’ forget-me-nots, remembering the literary names of roses but also having to deal with weeds. ‘Nettles’ Laing wrote ‘gloomily’ in her garden diary ‘[and] couch grass, brambles, alkanet’.
I enjoyed the author’s diversions into the past with sections on John Milton, John Clare, The Diggers, Derek Jarman, William Morris and, on a grander scale, about Capability Brown’s ruthless landscaping and the Middletons who owned Suffolk’s Shrubland Hall in Coddenham, using their slave owning wealth to create stately gardens. Ursula Buchan was less taken by this aspect of the book. She wrote in an article in The Spectator (25th May, 2024), that there were times ‘…when reading the oh-so-earnest political sentiments …I felt as though I were being beaten over the head by a sheaf of contemporary left-liberal preoccupations’.
Unfortunately, by the time I began reading Olivia Laing’s book, my own garden space had slipped from my grasp. For the time being I will have to make do with gardening vicariously through literature. The Garden Against Time has certainly provided a good start.
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