For the avid reader, discerning collector and real garden and Olivia Laing - fan (to be),
a like new, signed, 1st UK edition / 1st printing hardcover copy of
Olivia Laing
The Garden Against Time
In Search of a Common Paradise
Picador, London / UK, 2024
"A garden contains secrets, we all know that: buried elements that
might put on strange growth or germinate in unexpected places. The
garden that I chose had walls, but like every garden it was
interconnected, wide open to the world . . .’
In 2020,
Olivia Laing began to restore a walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown
Eden of unusual plants. The work drew her into an exhilarating
investigation of 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.
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 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." (panmacmillan.com)
"Olivia Laing is a widely acclaimed writer and critic. She’s the author of several books, including The Lonely City, Everybody and Funny Weather. Her first novel, Crudo, was a Sunday Times
top ten bestseller and won the 2019 James Tait Memorial Prize. Her work
has been translated into twenty-one languages and in 2018 she was
awarded a Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction." (panmacmillan.com)