There’s been a lot of rubbish written about Olivia Laing in the last few years, implying she’s ‘appropriated queerness’, over identified with marginal figures and that in marrying a Cambridge don, and moved to a posh house in the country, she’s sold out. As Rosa Abbott argues in a great Substack opinion piece, “Some of this is unfair. A non-binary person who grew up in a lesbian household in the era of Section 28, Laing has as much right to queerness as any of us. As for hypocrisy? Well, show me a left-wing liberal intellectual who doesn’t enjoy an antique carpet and a glass of Beaujolais and I’ll show you a liar.” Which leads me to The Garden Against Time, her book about, oh god, her garden in that posh house in the country! Before you chuck this review across the room, I implore you to read on because this is one of her very best. She admits that the garden is a political space tied up with all sorts of questions about privilege and exclusion but is also, “a place of rebel outposts and dreams of a communal paradise, like that of the Diggers…who made the still-radical assertion that the earth is a ‘common treasury’…for everyone to share”. Post Brexit, during Covid and corrupt Toryism, when “concepts like democracy, virtue, truth, liberalism became the punchline to Twitter jokes”, the garden like Milton’s Eden, “a memory palace of a better way of being”.  And with references to Christopher Hill, Derek Jarman, John Clare and Iris Origo among others, The Garden Against Time is proof that whatever AI can do, it will never do this. In one of the opening pages Laing states that, “The garden I chose had walls, but like every garden it was interconnected, wide-open to the world”. As wide-open as this great book, as it searches for a common paradise, and, to my mind, finds it. Totally recommended.

The Garden Against Time (In Search of Common Paradise) – Olivia Laing - Publ. By Picador £10.99

Steven Long