The Garden Against Time

Starred review from April 29, 2024
“A garden is a time capsule, as well as a portal out of time,” according to this searching study. Critic Laing (Everybody) examines how historical British gardens reflect the periods in which they were designed and contemporaneous understandings of paradise on Earth. Some tracts were “founded on exclusion and exploitation,” Laing contends, describing how aspiring aristocrat William Middleton relied on funds from his American slave plantations to build a garden on his Shrubland Hall property in the late 1700s, and how numerous estates in the early 19th century evicted entire villages to create the impression they were surrounded by untouched wilderness. Others had more inclusive, utopian ambitions. For instance, Gerrard Winstanley, the leader of a “breakaway sect of the English Civil War” called the Diggers, pursued his communitarian vision of society by growing carrots and corn that were shared among “all who laboured on it.” The lyrical prose emphasizes the ways in which gardens connect individuals across history (Laing notes that the daughters of a famous Victorian socialist minister who once owned Laing’s house likely walked past the same mulberry tree that still stands in her garden), leading the author to muse that her attraction to cultivating plants stems from wanting “to move into a different understanding of time: the kind of time that moves in spirals or cycles, pulsing between rot and fertility, light and darkness.” This is well worth seeking out.