REVIEW: The Garden Against Time (Olivia Laing)

Book: The Garden Against Time

Author: Olivia Laing

Premise: In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore a walled garden in Suffolk. 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 aristocratic gardens, Laing interrogates the cost of making paradise on earth - and finds utopian outposts amid the flower beds.

This book was not what I was expecting, sadly not in a good way. I was hoping for some interesting tours around gardens through history. What I got was a weird blend of memoir, historical accounts and political prose. The flow was also sudden meandering so that I was confused about who and where was being talked about. There were some interesting parts - I enjoyed the section about the community in Italy during the war. But on the whole I was quite bored and regretted not giving up on it earlier!