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.
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.'