In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf captures the allure of gardens for those with equivocal feelings about fellow humans, writing that Sally Seton “often went into her garden and got from her flowers a peace which men and women never gave her.” Gardens offer us a glimpse into prelapsarian natural beauty and slow living, but as Olivia Laing demonstrates in The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise, not everyone gets to relish the peace of these Edens. They are inherently politicized and deeply emotional spaces.

Laing’s celebrated works of creative nonfiction include To the River and The Lonely City, both of which prove she is unrivaled in her ability to interweave memoir with accounts of English landscapes and other artistic touchstones. Here she marshals this gift to chronicle her COVID-era efforts to resurrect a garden originally created by renowned landscape designer Mark Rumary and attached to her new home in Suffolk.

“The entire plot was just under a third of an acre,” she writes, “but it felt much larger because it had been cunningly divided with hedges, one of beech and one of yew, so that you could never see the entirety at once, but continually passed through doorways and arches into secretive spaces.” Fans of The Secret Garden, beware: this book will make you swoon. Just wait for the description of another garden’s riot of poppies, lilies, sunflowers, and rose-smothered arbors laid out as a series of “small secluded rooms.”

Laing has a background in botany and herbal medicine, and as she describes the thoughtfully conceived outdoor space beyond her door, she also creates its echo: a book that is prismatic, many-roomed, and a locus of contemplation. Her love of gardening is a starting-off place for digressions on topics as diverse as abundance, joy, cruelty, and loss. The beauties of the book clash against the vast wilderness of social injustice that both enables and circumscribes such enchanted spaces.

For example, as she muses on artist, activist, writer, and wallpaper designer William Morris—a Renaissance man in Pre-Raphaelite clothing—Laing notes that “he was forever inviting the garden inside” through his art. In the age of COVID, most of us yearned to step outside; by Laing’s calculations, three million Brits took up gardening (as she did) for the first time during the pandemic.

Rumary originally designed Laing’s property to evoke courtyard gardens in southern Spain. With the garden’s pool, geometric precision, and enclosed spaces, he created a type of layout that she explains is called “a paradise garden,” which flourished in Persia starting in 600 BCE. And on that note, Laing makes her first major digression, a ravishing reading of Milton’s Paradise Lost.

It’s a natural subject here: Milton completed the epic poem in a country cottage while laying low during London’s plague of 1665; Laing read it for the first time while sheltering in place. As she writes, the longing for a haven goes hand in hand with the sense of its loss: “Many people have lost a paradise, and even if they haven’t, the story of the lost paradise continues to resonate because nearly all of us have lost or relinquished or else forgotten the paradise of a child’s perception, when the world is so new and generous in its astonishments, let alone the sweet, fruitful paradise of first love, when the body itself becomes the garden.”

The garden also provides a fertile metaphor for even the most abstract principles of politics and economics. Laing’s acceptance of “the presence of death in the garden” reminds her of the “soon unpayable cost” of the illusion of perpetual growth in the age of capitalism. In one excursion off the primrose path, Laing explores the massive land-grab by England’s already landed gentry, which followed the early-nineteenth-century enclosure acts, through the story of the rise and fall of farm-laborer-turned-celebrity-poet John Clare. Clare planted around four hundred types of flowers, both garden-variety and wild, in the lines of his poems, some of which explicitly mourn the enclosure acts: “Inclosure came and trampled on the grave / Of labour’s rights and left the poor a slave.” As the countryside around him was parceled into smaller and smaller rooms like so many secret gardens-within-gardens, Clare was forced into a more dramatically confined space: A breakdown landed him in an asylum cell for the remainder of his life.

In one of my favorite interludes, Laing unspools the tale of Iris Origo, an Anglo-American heiress who married an impoverished Italian aristocrat and embellished his Tuscan estate with spectacular Renaissance-style gardens. During World War II, she staged plays of Sleeping Beauty and Snow White in these gardens with local children. She also opened the property as a safe haven for refugees from World War II—thereby politicizing her paradise.

In the age of COVID, Laing points out, “the lockdown also made it painfully apparent that the garden, that supposed sanctuary from the world, was inescapably political,” with socioeconomic status and race still expelling some people from its Arcadia before they have a chance to experience it. While gardens are accessible to nearly ninety percent of her country’s population, Black British people make up a disproportionate number among the ten percent; they are almost four times less likely than anyone else to have such access—even though many of the great British gardens exist only because of Black labor.

The book passes a long spell at Shrubland Hall, an English great house built in 1770 and maintained, in part, by money made from African slave trade. This estate, now defunct, didn’t just show off an extravagant garden—it contained gardens-within-gardens, such as the French Garden, the Fountain Garden, the Poplar Garden, the Swiss Garden, and the Hanging Basket Garden. Invoking W. G. Sebald’s remark in The Rings of Saturn about lavish gardens being one of the few acceptable outlets for displaying great wealth in earlier centuries,  and rather like the opening shots of Blue Velvet, in which David Lynch’s camera sinks into the mucky world beneath white picket fences and blue-ribbon roses, Laing exposes the hideousness under the topsoil of splendor cultivated by slavery on the owners’ rice plantations in the American South.

Also embedded within the political and cultural histories are two personal narratives that show Laing’s parents shut out of their own paradises. In a series of clipped flashbacks, Laing, her sister, her mother, and her mother’s female partner are forced to flee her childhood village when the locals learn that her mother is gay. Meanwhile, in counterpoint to the growth of Laing’s garden throughout the book, her father suffers the loss of his second wife as well as an emergency bypass, and he spends much of the story on the verge of losing his own garden and home due to the terms of his late wife’s will.

Both mother and father attend a garden party thrown by Laing and described near the end of the book. “It was probably the best day of my life,” she says, striking a Dallowayesque note as she details a party that expresses her creativity and care amid individual and collective tragedies. The delphiniums, lupines, iced fairy cakes, and sun hats came out to fête not just Laing’s garden but also the long-awaited release from isolation as guests mingled in the open air, relatively safe from the latest plague.

With so much narrative flora massing the pages, what holds the book together, for the most part, is the prose. We might call overblown writing “flowery language,” but Laing waxes flowery in a good way. Dreamy, variegated passages lush with lilies, tulips, and fritillaries float by. She drops the word “floriferous” more than once. Her most memorable moments come when she tempers botanical knowledge with humor, such as her description of cyclamen-flowered daffodils as “the ones that look like Piglet with his ears blown back.”

One problem for masters of the memoir/cultural criticism mix is that there is always so much to say. This kind of essayist knows that she can elaborate on certain stories in future books—or perhaps has covered them in more depth elsewhere already—which is both good and bad for the reader. For example, when Laing refers to a housing estate where she lived during childhood and wrote about in an earlier book, it can feel like getting the frustrating synopsis of a larger story. Elsewhere, I longed to hear more about her stint at Hecate, a woman’s housing co-op on the outskirts of Brighton where she and the other residents “made vegan ice cream to sell at raves and bonded at full moon with bare-breasted rituals in the back garden.” It’s clear that Laing repeatedly found and lost utopia before settling in Suffolk, but these too-brief sojourns outside her garden gates don’t enhance the narrative as much as her cultural and historical digressions do.

While reading The Garden Against Time, I kept thinking of Laing’s 2011 book, To the River, its title a tribute to To the Lighthouse. In To the River, the author walks along England’s River Ouse, in which Virginia Woolf drowned herself, after having lost a job and, “through sheer carelessness,” a lover. Interspersing her pilgrimage with vignettes about Woolf and Derek Jarman (who also looms large in The Garden Against Time), as well as stories about lesser-knowns like amateur archaeologist Charles Dawson, Laing plumbs what it means to plunge into rushing waters both metaphorically and fatally. She says of Woolf, “This desire to enter the depths is what drew me to her, for though she eventually foundered, for a time it seemed she possessed, like some free divers, a gift for descending beneath the surface of the world.” The River Ouse and the currents of Woolf’s genius provided sanctuary initially, their paradise not so much eventually lost as gained too dearly.

As much as I savored The Garden Against Time, I might feel To the River is more fully realized. I admire it more.I love the abiding metaphors in both, but To the River keeps afloat through the concision of most of its cultural tangents, while Garden occasionally stagnates within its garden rooms, as when Laing dives deep into the genealogy of the slave profiteers at Shrubland Hall. The key to the strengths of each book lies in their titles. To the River has the propulsive, forward-moving narrative of a journey; Garden dwells within the temporal circularity of harvests and reveries, reveling in plots of the horticultural, rather than the literary, kind. As Laing writes near the end, garden time “moves in unpredictable ways, sometimes stopping altogether and proceeding always cyclically, in a long unwinding spiral of rot and fertility.”

It seems no accident that some of the best books about gardens, including Jamaica Kincaid’s My Garden and Jarman’s Modern Nature, come from marginalized people: a Black woman living in the United States, an HIV-positive gay man living in England in the 1980s. Earlier this year, Kincaid published An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children: An Alphabetary of the Colonized World, ina cross-fertilization with artist Kara Walker that digs into the entanglement between floral imaginaries and colonialism. Perhaps we’re finally growing an awareness of the steep price at which many paradises are bought.

The Garden Against Time makes it clear that gardens arise from the imagination as well as the soil. Letting readers into these fragrant exterior and interior courtyards feels like literature’s reversal of the enclosure acts. Since I’m someone who must satisfy her yearning for a paradise with plants on a condo sunporch, I hope we continue to see books that welcome us into such lush and expansive private spaces.

– Cynthia Gralla