The Garden Against Time by Olivia Laing

Publisher: Picador

Year: 2024

Format: Hardcover

Edition: First

Inspired by the walled garden Laing began restoring in 2020, The Garden Against Time is an exhilarating investigation into paradise and its long association with gardens. 

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.

As well as how the garden has, and might, be a place of rebel outposts and communal dreams; where new ways of living can and have been attempted amidst the flower beds, experiments that could prove vital in the coming era of climate change.

Orders will be dispatched 1st May