The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise by Olivia Laing (W.W. Norton & Company)
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.…
Gerald looked up at the sky, wiping his hands on his overalls. The rain is coming again. It will be arduous, and the crops will probably fail. However, after that comes the season of plenty. The crops will grow.
They’d better.
Marcus, his son, walked along carrying two milk buckets. They exchanged glances.
“Come here,” Gerald said, taking off his tattered Stetson and dropping it on the porch beside him. “We have to talk”
“I’ve got to get the milk over to the…”
“Don’t worry about that,” Gerald took a seat in one of the cork chairs on the porch. “Sit.”
Marcus put the milk down and sat down in the chair beside his father. For a few moments, they peered at the fading sun in the sky.…
When my parents divorced, I was seventeen years old. By that time, my alcoholism was in full swing. I came by it honestly. Alcoholism runs through my father’s side of the family like a brush fire.
I wasn’t self-aware enough at the time to understand that my thirst for alcohol was a combination of genetics and a desperate desire to feel the way other people looked. Even if someone had told me this back then, I probably wouldn’t have cared. In fact, there was very little that I did care about. I certainly didn’t give a shit about my own well-being.
My drink of choice was Rumple Minze, which is basically peppermint flavored gasoline. Being underage, I couldn’t drink whenever I wanted, but I found plenty of opportunities to indulge myself. …
“He’s very weak, Rory,” Aunt Tricia says, quietly, through the phone.
What medical training Rory has, considering physiotherapy never prepares you for end-of-life care, kicks in. “How much longer do you think?”
“The doctors say a year at most, with treatment.”
“And he’s—doing the treatment?”
“No.” Aunt Tricia clears her throat. Her voice is surprisingly strong, just a bit wobbly on certain syllables. “No, he doesn’t think that will do any good. He’s been through so much of it already. He’s done with that.”
What must this be doing to her? Her husband, no longer her husband and yet still—technically they’ve remained married since he went to prison, even though she knows the truth and Rory knows she knows—miles away from her in a strange building, strange hospital, whom she’s only seen on visits, now suddenly home with her, wasting away before her, with her every moment.…
December 31st 1999: We all stayed the night at a mid-range hotel in the town next to our own just outside of Boston. The boys and I had spent the past few days sliding around unfinished hardwood panels in our socks, and eating off our family room couch we’d crammed into the kitchen to make space for the new floors. We knew nothing of Y2K, or what was to come, nor did we care for anything but that our parents had turned our house into an empty playground. Laughing into the cold Massachusetts air, we ran to the Jeep and our mother, smiling, said “hold on” as she tried to unlock the car fast enough for her eager children and their father. So we wore sunglasses in the shape of “2000” into the night of the new year while big men turned our house back into a home.…
Millie, the deputy director, offered her cabin in the Cuyamaca mountains for our managers’ retreat. It was early May, and the lilacs were just beginning to blossom, she told us; they would be in full bloom for the retreat in two weeks. We all knew about Millie’s lilacs. Their giddying fragrance would engulf us at the door on Monday mornings after she’d spent a weekend at the cabin, floating through the hallway from office to office. Five of us, Millie and the department heads, would go up on Thursday for a pre-retreat planning meeting; the program managers would join us Friday morning.
We decided to pool our culinary talents and each bring or make something for dinner at the cabin. We five often went out to lunch together on Mondays, more of a social than a business ritual.…
I used to be diligent in my defense against the growing forces of dog hair, using a lint roller or my hands to fend off their growing numbers. My decision to wear black clothing became a signal of my inability to adapt. I loved my dog more than anything in the world and I didn’t care if people knew I had a dog by glancing at my clothes. The evidence was there for the world to see, and eventually I gave up and waved the white flag of defeat.
What started as a minor inconvenience, had soon turned into my worst nightmare. The dog hair, unsatisfied with me surrendering my clothing, became greedy and continued its relentless conquest. My frustration accumulated as I began waking up with dog hair in my mouth.…
