The Garden Against Time

Inspired by the restoration of her own garden, "imaginative and empathetic critic" (NPR) Olivia Laing embarks on an exhilarating investigation of paradise.

"An impassioned and wide-ranging work." —A.O. Scott, New York Times Book Review

Finalist for the 2024 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction
Finalist for the 2024 Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing

A #1 Sunday Times (UK) Bestseller • A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • A Kirkus Reviews "Best Book of the 21st Century (So Far)" • A New Yorker Best Book of 2024 • A Chicago Public Library Must-Read Book of 2024 • An Oprah Daily "Most Thought-Provoking Book" of 2024

In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore an eighteenth-century walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work brought to light a crucial question for our age: Who gets to live in paradise, and how can we share it while there’s still time? Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton’s Paradise Lost to John Clare’s enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Laing interrogates the sometimes shocking cost of making paradise on earth.

But the story of the garden doesn’t always enact larger patterns of privilege and exclusion. It’s also a place of rebel outposts and communal dreams. From the improbable queer utopia conjured by Derek Jarman on the beach at Dungeness to the fertile vision of a common Eden propagated by William Morris, new modes of living can and have been attempted amidst the flower beds, experiments that could prove vital in the coming era of climate change. The result is a humming, glowing tapestry, a beautiful and exacting account of the abundant pleasures and possibilities of gardens: not as a place to hide from the world but as a site of encounter and discovery, bee-loud and pollen-laden.