A joyful expansion on the meaning of the subject it undertakes ... Laing is wonderfully free in her associations and does not cater to conventional expectations. Any of the stories in The Garden Against Time could inspire a full-length book, but it’s one of Laing’s talents to corral them in one place without alienating the reader.
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 ... 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.
Extended discussions of war, disease, and climate crisis do nothing to dampen the tone of the book, which proceeds like a pleasant garden-party conversation. Laing is a welcoming but unobtrusive hostess, handling her dark materials with social grace ... She embeds others’ words in her own sentences as carefully as I imagine she transplants seedlings, adapting them to their new conditions without compromising their integrity ... There are sections that do, however, feel like a slog, waterlogged by dutiful moralizing.
Laing maps the ghosts of gardens and sacred spaces destroyed through war ... What makes this captivating book more than an elaborate journal of gardening and its fraught history is Laing’s insistence on Jarman’s idea that 'paradise haunts gardens.'
Laing considers the contradictions of garden ... Though enriching, the tangled histories can feel, at times, difficult to sift through. The passages that return to the author’s work and musings on the Suffolk garden appear as welcome resting places for the weary reader.
She demonstrates her ability to correctly identify plants (admittedly impressive) and describes the gratifying transformation of the garden from unruly catastrophe to sculpted idyll. These passages, and Laing’s delicate bouquet of language, are certainly reason enough to read The Garden Against Time. But there is little here for those interested in specific ideas about how investing in green spaces might bring about a better, more equitable future ... Perplexingly, Laing does not meaningfully acknowledge the paradox of relishing her private garden while insisting that we would all benefit from more public access to more land ... Her historical lens enfeebles her overall project.
Remarkably vulnerable in its function as a vehicle for Laing to think through the pain of others; to mend her own shortcomings and live purposively on her patch of land. Whatever occasional disagreements I had with it were fruitful, bred by a spirit of intended generosity imbued within the text.
Part memoir, part polemic, part garden history and part garden-making ... The impossible position of her own book evolves in a more domestic theatre. She desires a garden, a personal, private sanctuary; but this is at odds with a vigorous polemical stance that deplores private ownership of land.
Laing’s book is an account of restoring the garden to its glory days. This gives her the chance to write...glorious, looping sentences ... Laing perfects the methodology she deployed so skilfully in her much-loved The Lonely City and more recent Everybody, of embedding biographical detours to advance rather than merely illustrate her central argument.
As fragrantly replete as a long border at its peak. The word that comes to mind is spumy: a blossomy, brimful excess that’s almost too much at times ... The literary and historical stuff is not half so infectiously written as Laing’s account of her garden ... I preferred to languish in what’s basically a love story, with all the passion and intimacy this involves. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that captures so well not only the deep pleasures and satisfactions of gardening.
Eden has long coloured our image of heaven on Earth, but reading Laing’s book is more akin to the labour-intensive realities of yardwork: pockets of refuge and nurture break up necessary toil. The history of gardening, of humans occupying and reshaping land to their own design, is expectedly thorny.
