The garden against time : in search of a common paradise / Olivia Laing.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Laing, Olivia, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Gardens--Conservation and restoration--England.

Gardens.

Gardens--England--Suffolk.

Historic gardens--England.

Historic gardens.

Physical Description:

317 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm

Edition:

First American edition.

Place of Publication:

New York, N.Y. : W. W. Norton & Company, [2024]

Summary:

"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"-- Publisher description.

Contents:

A Door in the Wall

Paradise

A Landscape Without People

The Sovran Planter

Garden State

Benton Apollo

The World My Wilderness

The Expelling Angel.

Notes:

"First published in Great Britain in 2024 by Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan"--title page verso.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 305-312).

Local Notes:

Athenaeum copy: Garrison fund bookplate.

ISBN:

9780393882001

0393882004

OCLC:

1398567882