All in all a brilliant piece of writing by Laing, but I personally would have loved it a ton more if it was more brief and more concise. A few bits felt overly self-indulgent only because of my lack of interest in her musings presumably. This obviously is a subjective view and feeling. Perhaps this is a common reaction for a first time Laing reader? Have been asked to read her plenty in the past, but did not manage to make time for it so am glad I was able to do so now. Definitely want to read some more of her work. All I can say is that I came to her expecting - well I suppose something along the lines of Derek Jarman? And because those unfairly conjured expectations were not met, it compromised my experience and pleasure of reading the book. I just wanted a lot more from the book, but I am also fully aware that it is not the writer's job to feed my personal cravings and wants as a reader.

I love Laing's books but this isn't one of her best.
I know the area where she lives and her sense of place is excellent. It just all seemed a bit lack lustre.
Gorgeous cover!

An incredible book from one of my all-time favourite authors. Laing is a master of narrative, weaving the personal and the political into tapestries that span the breadth of art, history and culture. This is a gift of a book, a flourishing of ideas and beauty,

Melancholic, clear, entranced, entrancing: a poetic immersion into a green world

It has taken me far longer to read Laing’s latest book, which I had as an ARC, than I hoped. This is not from any fault with the book, rather, Laing is always a writer who needs slow, thoughtful reading, with breaks, as her thinking and writing is deep, lush and should be savoured, whatever the subject matter.

This felt particularly pertinent here, where she is writing a history of gardens, general, a history of some specific gardens, and her own making or remaking of her own garden, in a somewhat derelict garden (with house!) which she bought, in Suffolk, as lockdown changed all lives. This garden had been originally created by a famous garden designer of the twentieth century Mark Rumery.

My slow, paced reading, with breaks, seemed absolutely of a piece with the rhythms of the natural world. Laing is a very intense, beautiful and poetic writer, weaving so many threads and ideas together, inserting herself into the web of her book. Even the order and arrangement of the naming of plant varieties seemed like something which needed time to settle, letting a seed root, germinate, sprout and flower, so I could let a flavour or idea develop.

I am not a gardener, but am someone who intensely appreciates the labour of others, an inveterate peering-into-front-gardens-of-others, I will stop and talk to their flowers! Someone who gets their own hands down and dirty and tenderly nurturing the green will really find this a binge-fest of the delicious.

But there is so much more here. Laing weaves in, seamlessly, her love of literature, history, her radical politics, her ecological perspectives, and her personal story. Rich mulch. Figures of literary radicalism (within their time) stalk these pages, Milton, John Clare, also, radical artists, like Derek Jarman, who was also a garden creator.

I found her philosophical, social history, environmental analysis of the tension between gardens, how they came to be, how they are now and might HAVE to be for the future, in a world where global warming is real, pressing and advancing, particularly potent – the opening and closing chapters.

Curiously, what I found this book most like, and Laing’s writing, most like was the experience of Vaughn William’s beautiful Lark Ascending. A particularly English kind of melancholy which holds transcendence and joy within it.

The Garden Against Time by Olivia Laing is a collection of eight essays, based on the central theme of gardens, real and imagined.
Before the pandemic began, in 2020, Laing started the work of restoring a walled garden surrounding the house she and her partner had just bought in Suffolk. As she works at rebuilding the garden, she begins an investigation on the idea of paradise in relation to gardens. She delves into the history of real as well as imagined gardens, from Paradise Lost by Milton ro private gardens that became sanctuary for refugees and partisans in wartime Italy. She interrogates the cost of making paradise on earth by looking back at the aristocratic pleasure grounds of the past that were funded by and built on slavery. As the reader comes to terms with gardens representing the ideas of privilege and exclusion. Laing shows us that these man-made paradises can be places of revolution, communal dreams, queer utopias, and climate change too.
What I liked about the book is the way Laing connects her personal history with gardens with elements of literature, history, politics, art, and philosophy. This is something that specifically attracted me to her writing even in her previous book too, The Lonely City. In Garden Against Time, I found each page a revelation like Laing’s garden in Suffolk itself that she digs and fertilizes to find beauty as well as rot under the surface. I was particularly fascinated by her idea of garden time where time is circular instead of linear with constant occurrence of death and life, as flowers die and bloom over and over again.

I fell ill and could not read anything.... eventually, I could and found this book a wonderful paean to life, to beauty, to ideas and, of course, to gardens and gardening. This book is a sort of double diary - on the one hand, the author tells us of how she goes about re-building a garden, and on the other, she shares with us her readings and thoughts around gardens as a site of paradise... the exploration ranges in time and place, from the better known (say William Morris, Milton or Capability Brown's gardening efforts) to less well-known (at least to me!) choices (Cedric Morris's irises, Iris Origo's La Foce...).
I am not a gardener. I love gardens and flowers, but have not got a garden, or expert knowledge, be it of flowers or garden history. I found reading the e-book absolutely ideal because I could visualise precisely by doing a simple search, the precise type of plant (Laing is precise in her use of binomial nomenclature and I for one loved it as it really emphasised the richness of the natural world, the ingenuity of gardeners, how to name is to see... anyway, I found the writing style conversationally precise, the ideas rich enough to make me think, without pedantry or arrogance. It is a book that opens many worlds, real and imaginary, and that took me onto an unexpected journey. I recommend it heartily.

Thank you to NetGalley and Picador for the early copy of this book.

This was a well-written book and very readable but for me the ratio of talking about the current garden and its restoration, to the history of paradise in garden form was not balanced, as while it was interesting I needed more about the day-to-day of renewing and caring for the garden.

Her life writing is always spectacular and so introducing a love of gardening, that I could read about forever, made this the perfect Olivia Laing book for me. The illustrations between chapters are also gorgeous.

Thank You Pan McMillan /Picador and Netgalley for this ARC


This Biography of Olivia Laing starts as a lot of great ideas and hobbies do, the Lockdown. It tells of her plans and then execution of the walled garden she decides to restore. She asks questions of us as readers , about real and imagined gardens in history, literature and around her.

It's definitely a beautifully written book, very lyrical and descriptive. I am not the hugest fan of gardening and this is only why I couldn't rate the book higher than I have rated it,

olivia laing is obviously talented and occasionally she breaks out into brilliance, but i think i find autofiction altogether pretty self absorbed and obvious. this is definitely leaning on that.

as usual, intellectual, unique, observant and just written beautifully, Olivia Laing’s ‘Garden Against Time’ is timely. as someone that knows nothing about gardening I was slightly apprehensive going into this, but Laing is truly incapable of boring me, I loved it. hooked into this novel, her usual perfect anecdotes and observations on politics, culture, life, humanity, plants. truly marvellous and exciting.
I feel like I learnt so much while reading this book. I adore.

Olivia Laing takes us on the journey through the life of the garden she takes ownership of during lockdown. Through the history of the garden's past and her own history, she attempts to plot a future with the garden at its heart. As she explores what the garden means to her, she draws on other gardens and gardeners to act as way markers and as lessons in both what to do and what not to do. She looks at the dark history under some of the most elegant gardens and at the way gardens, both real and imagined have shaped our responses to nature and to life itself. This is elegant, beautiful and clever. It's romantic and thoughtful and smart. I loved it.

In <i>The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise</i>, Olivia Laing offers a deeply personal memoir of her experience restoring the garden attached to her house in Suffolk, a project undertaken amidst the turmoil of the COVID-19 pandemic. As the world grappled with uncertainty, many, like Laing, sought solace in the quietude of their gardens, balconies, and window boxes.

Purchased with her husband, the garden becomes a canvas for her to explore themes of growth, renewal, and the search for paradise. Laing's narrative is a blend of personal reflection and historical exploration.

Her detailed restoration efforts merge with a literary history of gardens as her gardening is accompanied by her reading. She immerses herself in the works of literary figures such as John Clare, Iris Origo, Rose Macaulay, WG Sebald, and John Milton. It is in the pages of Milton's "Paradise Lost" that she finds a new lens through which to view her own garden and its historical and symbolic significance.

While the pacing of the book can be slow at times, and the depth of historical detail may be overwhelming for some readers, Laing's poetic prose and insightful observations make this memoir a compelling read. Her ability to intertwine personal anecdotes with broader themes of literature and history creates a narrative that is both engaging and thought-provoking.

Many thanks to NetGalley for providing an advance reader copy of this book.

To read an Olivia Laing book feels as if you brain has been removed, given a good shake, your skill scrubbed out and everything plumbed back in. But in the best possible way.

Each book she has conjured up (despite the research that underpins them they always feel slightly magical) is an improbable but irresistible journey that enlightens and delights. And The Garden Against Time is no exception.

I admit that I wasn’t too thrilled about the prospect of a book about gardens – how wrong I was. This is a wonderful exploration about the importance of gardens and how embedded they are in individual personal histories and our wider shared histories all done with an assured but deft touch.

As always, Laing tackles some huge ideas from seemingly tiny beginnings and does so in elegant yet incredibly readable prose. Don’t worry about whether you know anything about plants or gardening – all you need is an open mind. Time spent with an Olivia Laing book is always time very well spent.

Top tip – read this in conjunction with Laing’s Instagram account where there are plenty of photographs of the beautiful garden she has created.

The Garden Against Time:In Search of a Common Paradise by Olivia Laing is a thought provoking memoir, recounting Laing’s experience of restoring an overgrown garden in Suffolk. As she replants the garden, Laing considers the wider meaning of gardens and their place in history by exploring real and imagined gardens.

I found this an enjoyable read and it really got me thinking about gardens in a way that I hadn’t considered before. I particularly enjoyed Laing’s exploration of the garden in relation to war.

Overall this was an interesting read, it was my first time reading her work and I look forward to exploring her other works.

There is no doubt that Laing is an essential writer of non-fiction. Her approach, splicing the personal with her essayistic musings on subjects such as Virginia Woolf, loneliness, and alcoholism is not necessarily a new one, but there is certainly an argument to be made that she does it best. In The Garden Against Time , Laing turns her eye to the garden, a place connected with a certain privilege and the concept of paradise, bringing writers like Milton and Derek Jarman along for the ride. At times this can be deeply interesting, but this is, perhaps, her most niche book.

After Everybody, a book that was expansive and formally daring, The Garden Against Time feels safer. Its subject is much less radical—though, at times, Laing is able to tease out interesting questions about class and access—and, overall, feels more straightforward. Though Laing’s books have always been peppered with autobiography, here we perhaps get the closest to a memoir proper. The act of buying and then building a garden is the book’s backbone off which she hangs broader discussions of eden and art. Her references, however, seem more rooted in an English literary history and, perhaps, due to the subject, they can, at times, feel slightly less interesting than her previous efforts. Though, this is more likely to do with where my own interests lie, which is to say that, growing up, I was made to help in the garden as a punishment for any wrongdoing.

It is, however, a testament to Laing as a writer that, even through the subject did not call out to me, I was able to revel in how she writes.

Posted on Goodreads 29/04/24: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6457050665

From an author better known to me for her Goldsmith Prize shortlisted novel "Crudo" - about immediacy and the Twitter newscycle (and Kathy Acker), a non-fiction book about patience, the garden growth cycle (and Derek Jarman)

One for any green fingered literary fans.

My thanks go to NetGalley and Picador for a review copy of this book in exchange for my honest feedback.

Context note for this review - Olivia Laing has a hold over me as a reader, one that feels spellbinding and unexplainable at times, and you must tale everything I say with that in mind.

The Garden Against Time is a different book for me to pick up. It doesn’t fit with the majority of what I would usually read, even when you place it in the category of new releases. Olivia Laing, however, carries a weight with her that means I will, for the rest of my life, pick up anything she puts into the world.

My love for Laing and her writing starting back at the end of 2022. I’d had my eye on The Lonely City for quite a while, and eventually picked it up. I’ve mentioned my thoughts on that book in other writings of mine, but just know that things snowballed very very quickly from there, and by the middle of 2023 I was completely taken by Olivia Laing’s work.

The artists that Laing has introduced me too through her writing, have gone on to take up significant spots in my day to day life, and I feel like I’ve grown in outlook, in world views, in general interests, to flesh myself out as a person. Laing will not know the effect her books have had on me and my life, but I want to wax lyrical about it for a while, and make sure it is known.

Now back to the book at hand.

The Garden Against Time is a story at its centre. It follows Olivia Laing on her gardening journey, beginning in 2020 lockdown times, and moves through a timeline that matches with Laing’s research around “the Garden” as a single entity and its relation to forms of paradise and escape.

Stories are told about John Milton, William Morris, even Derek Jarman makes an appearance that felt both unsurprising and wonderfully heartfelt. If you’ve read any Laing before, seeing Jarman’s name pop up within her pages always feels like bumping into an old friend.

The stories around these various characters are at once both calming, well-researched, and detailed, whilst also keeping a hold of the passion and emotion that is clearly held in the author. Having so much to say, knowing quite so much, can have a certain detrimental effect on the reading experience a lot of the time. Things become academic without ever providing enough information to compare to an actually academic paper, and what’s then left is a book that floats between interesting and informative without ever taking the reigns of either. You’re safe in the hands of Laing, however, as I feel that she, more than most, has a knack for maintaining an element of fun and engaging writing without losing any of the information that makes the story being told worthwhile.

Olivia Laing has surprised me again here, as her abilities as a writer have made me feel an interest in gardens and gardening, flowers and plants, paradises and old mythical texts, that matches how I became hooked onto the artists that were mentioned in the first book of hers that I picked off the shelf. I’ll be here for the next book, no matter the topic, and you should be right here to.

Absolutely stunningly written book. Have pre ordered the hardcopy as want to keep in my 'forever books' shelf.

This led me to order so many classic books, included Milton's Paradise Lost.

Olivia's writing style is sumbtious. I have all her previous publications & would always pre order her new publications. I love her essays & how she deeply reflective of life.

Recommended to biy this to everyone I know. Can't wait for the hardback book to arrive & read in my garden this Spring & Summer. Will inform my garden plans for the next years.

Olivia Laing is an author whose perspective I always find fascinating- her ability to draw from numerous reference points and take the ordinary to unexpected places is something that she does excellently here, taking her garden during lockdown and exploring the roles that nature, solitude and slowing down can have on the human psyche, and indeed how we often run against these dehumanising forces of the wider world, and how nature is a reminder of what we can return to.

And although that sounds like an over-stressed idea by this point, her ability to draw on many other references makes this something very special.