The Garden Against Time

"""[The Garden Against Time is a] celebration by the acclaimed writer and critic of the abundant pleasures and possibilities of gardens—not as a place to hide from the world but as a site of experiment and discovery—that ranges from pandemic Suffolk to utopian visions of a new Eden, while also examining the sometimes shocking costs of making paradise on Earth."" -- Financial Times ""Olivia Laing's The Garden Against Time is a close and vagrant meditation on the tended plot as real and metaphoric paradise, a potentially radical place to overwinter and come back out to hope."" -- Brian Dillon - The Millions ""I’ve been a fan of Laing’s since The Lonely City, a formative read for a much-younger me…so I’m looking forward to her latest, an inquiry into paradise refracted through the experience of restoring an 18th-century garden at her home the English countryside. As always, her life becomes a springboard for exploring big, thorny ideas (no pun intended)—in this case, the possibilities of gardens and what it means to make paradise on earth."" -- Sophia M. Stewart - The Millions ""A book that begins as beguiling and beautiful then flicks into the revelatory: the work of salvaging a ruined garden in Suffolk becomes a book about a different kind of salvation altogether. Her mind is so agile, so capacious, so widely ranging, so consistently surprising. If I had the means, I’d present her with large plots of land every year so that she could write books such as this again and again."" -- Neel Mukherjee, author of The Lives of Others ""A cumulative intellectual with a golden pen, Laing… connects collectivity with dirt, hand-building both private and generous new worlds as safe refuge and risky experiments."" -- Sarah Schulman, author of Let the Record Show ""Laing probes important questions about land ownership and exclusion and the human drive to create paradise on earth. All the while, her elegant prose bewitches and beguiles. A truly wonderful read."" -- Sue Stuart-Smith, author of The Well-Gardened Mind"