An Ode to Gardens That’s Also a Bouquet of Ideas

THE GARDEN AGAINST TIME: In Search of a Common Paradise, by Olivia Laing

Unlike Olivia Laing, I don’t much care for gardening. Like her, however, I’m very fond of gardens, provided my allergies are under control and there aren’t too many bugs around. What I love even more — and I suspect she feels the same way — is reading about gardens. I don’t know hellebore from hogweed, but an artfully arranged list of plant names is among my favorite poetic genres.

Laing’s latest book, “The Garden Against Time,” is bursting with such lists. Every few pages, she gathers an abundant, unruly bouquet of floral nomenclature, either of her own making or gleaned from fellow writers who have wrung inspiration from the lives of plants. She catalogs the shifting contents of her own garden (“fig and jasmine, Akebia quinata and Virginia creeper”) and surveys real and imaginary specimens from the past. There is an effortless lyricism to her descriptions, for example of a spot in Oxfordshire designed by the Victorian textile designer, reformer and essayist William Morris, “with its violets and winter aconites, its meads of tulips and fritillary, its tumbling strawberry beds infiltrated by hollyhocks and raided by thrushes, despite the nets.”

“The Garden Against Time” is partly a memoir. In 2020, Laing and her husband, the poet and translator Ian Patterson, acquired a house in Suffolk with a small garden designed by a locally prominent landscape architect named Mark Rumary. The revitalization of Rumary’s overgrown plots was a herculean project, one that unfolded through seasons of pandemic, political anxiety and personal grief. Laing shares a bit about her marriage and a little more about her childhood, her bohemian early adulthood and her father’s illness, but personal narrative serves as a trellis for what is, at heart, an impassioned and wide-ranging work of literary criticism.

This isn’t a historical survey of gardening, much less a practical guide, so much as an inquiry into the idea of the garden — its history and poetics, its relationship to sex, imagination and power. Laing, whose other books include ruminations on writers and drinking (“The Trip to Echo Spring”) and on urban life (“The Lonely City”), as well as a novel (“Crudo”), is a natural hybridizer. She belongs in an as-yet-undefined and perhaps undefinable class of prose artists who blend feeling and analysis, speculation and research, wit and instruction as they track down the elusive patterns and inescapable contradictions of modern experience. If I were in an algorithmic mood, I’d mention Geoff Dyer, Teju Cole, Jenny Diski (who was married to Ian Patterson until her death in 2016) and W.G. Sebald.

Laing herself has a lot to say about Sebald, whose Suffolk perambulations in “The Rings of Saturn” overlap with her own and whose critique of the local topography helps Laing articulate one of her principal themes. “As Sebald is at pains to point out,” she writes, “the sublime parkland of the 18th-century house might look natural, with its broad expanses of closely cropped grass, its serpentine lakes and pleasant groupings of oaks, but it is a masquerade, a fantasy of what a landscape should be.”