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.

A friend had recommended me Laing's book on cities as matching my interests, but before happening across that in the wild, I saw this on Netgalley, and I do like gardens too, not least walled gardens - and that title! What I had forgotten, of course, is that while I love gardens, I am considerably less interested in gardening, and that an account of restoring one of the former will necessarily include an awful lot of the latter. Nor was this the only time I was minded to have words with the recommending friend, even as I reminded myself that I had gone off-road here and so only had myself to blame. Too much of The Garden Against Time revisits reference points exhausted in modern non-fiction, or at least the corners of it I frequent; I could happily go a decade without yet another modern drawing my attention to Sebald or John Clare, whose district of ideaspace must by now be as cluttered an erstwhile frontier as the route up Everest. As for the insights regarding Milton, I suspect even readers possessing considerably more patience with Paradise Lost than me may find their patience tried. On the autobiographical side, having the builders in remains one of those areas of life where you'll listen to it from a mate out of a sense of duty, but expecting the general public to pay for it is taking the piss. As for the saga of her dad's various misfortunes - even aside from my still very mixed feelings when it comes to reading about the pandemic, it somehow manages to be sad without being interesting. But I think the most annoying of the lot was when, towards the end of a thread which mouths the standard pieties about enclosure and colonialism and the inequality necessary to the gardens of great houses, this plops into view: "Philanthropy was a tradition with both sets of grandparents, a way of continually attempting to ameliorate a kind of wealth that at some buried level must have been understood as indefensible." The insistence that deep down, everyone else must share one's own values really, regardless of outward contradictions, may seem benign next to the crusading instinct to kill or convert everyone who disagrees, may be founded in wholesome beliefs about our shared humanity, but I nevertheless struggle to convey my loathing for the condescension and failure of imagination it embodies.

Despite all of which, I was never in any doubt that I was going to keep reading. Even that godawful sentence came from a mostly fascinating account of an Anglo-Irish woman who married into the Italian aristocracy and then lived through fascism and the War there - one of a few times that I have to be wary what I say in case of spoilers, which is itself an accomplishment in a non-fiction book about gardens. There are other sidebars here which don't suffer from the overuse that Sebald and Clare do, accounts of utopian communes both personal and historical which went the exact same way utopian communes always do, but whose particulars were nonetheless worth preserving and propagating. Even on more frequented turf - Derek Jarman, William Morris, the Barbican - Laing can sometimes find a new angle, or just a spirit in the retelling, which justifies their presence. The gradually assembled history of the gardener who preceded her on her own little plot is gently heartbreaking, and when her descriptions of gardens themselves get past the lists and the mulching, there are passages which sing. Perhaps my continued attention was guaranteed by the early reference to the "English heresy" of thinking of Paradise as a garden - which, as Laing points out, can hardly be heretical when that's the literal meaning of the word, and isn't all of that beautiful? I'm tempted to end on a pat horticultural summation of this maddeningly mixed reading experience - you need the manure to get the roses, maybe? - but instead I'll say that I will probably still read the city book if I see it.

The author's guardianship of a garden. Olivia Lang and her husband move to a house with a grand but neglected garden during Covid. Her love of garden history and literature shines through, with references from Milton's Paradise Lost and the Garden of Eden to Andrew Marvell, naturalist John Clare and polymath William Morris. Snippets about her early life come through, revealing why having her own garden is so important to her. A glorious book for anyone who loves looking round National Trust gardens and enjoys working in their own or communal patches of ground.

The Garden Against Time by Olivia Laing is a combination of memoir and more historical information about gardens and the art of gardening.