The garden against time In search of a common paradise

"A garden is a time capsule, as well as a portal out of time," according to this searching study. Critic Laing (Everybody) examines how historical British gardens reflect the periods in which they were designed and contemporaneous understandings of paradise on Earth. Some tracts were "founded on exclusion and exploitation," Laing contends, describing how aspiring aristocrat William Middleton relied on funds from his American slave plantations to build a garden on his Shrubland Hall property in the late 1700s, and how numerous estates in the early 19th century evicted entire villages to create the impression they were surrounded by untouched wilderness. Others had more inclusive, utopian ambitions. For instance, Gerrard Winstanley, the leader of a "breakaway sect of the English Civil War" called the Diggers, pursued his communitarian vision of society by growing carrots and corn that were shared among "all who laboured on it." The lyrical prose emphasizes the ways in which gardens connect individuals across history (Laing notes that the daughters of a famous Victorian socialist minister who once owned Laing's house likely walked past the same mulberry tree that still stands in her garden), leading the author to muse that her attraction to cultivating plants stems from wanting "to move into a different understanding of time: the kind of time that moves in spirals or cycles, pulsing between rot and fertility, light and darkness." This is well worth seeking out. (June)

The award-winning author pens a fascinating and personal journey of paradise. When Laing, author of Everybody, Funny Weather, and other acclaimed books, bought a house in Suffolk, she did so mostly for the garden. Especially during the early pandemic, the dilapidated yet lush yard became her personal project. Spending hours with her hands in the dirt, she became enraptured not just with her own garden, but with the history of gardens and their association with paradise. The result is this intellectually stimulating, vibrant book. Laing describes gardens of her own acquaintance in sensuous, compelling detail, allowing readers to see, smell, and touch them alongside her. Similarly, the author moves through fascinating currents of thought, ranging from Paradise Lost to the history of enslavement in plantations, with tactile dexterity. "The lockdown made it painfully apparent that the garden, that supposed sanctuary from the world, was inescapably political," she writes. As the author unpacks the fraught history of colonialism and class inequality in relation to gardens, she offers intriguing examinations of utopias. Laing describes the version of utopia espoused by 19th-century landscaper and socialist William Morris as a place where "people work because they want to, as gardeners do, out of sheer love of making something. The capitalist system of alienated labor has melted into air." Gardens, therefore, might be historical as well as contemporary sites of inequality, but they can also allow us to imagine a more buoyant and radical future. Suffused with Laing's distinctively skillful prose, this book is an impressive achievement. "One of the most interesting aspects of gardens: that they exist on the threshold between artifice and nature, conscious decision and wild happenstance," Laing writes, and the author's fascinating research and well-honed writing are a testament to the beauty of that threshold. An intellectually verdant and emotionally rich narrative journey. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.