Backward glances from a walled garden

Olivia Laing searches for a common paradise

by Jaimee F. Edwards

In The Garden Against Time, Olivia Laing writes, “I was out at first light in my pyjamas and a coat, poking about the beds, looking for new arrivals.” Snap! 

On the days I am not up at 5am to go to my hospitality job, I am in the garden, coat over pyjamas, slippers over bed socks, studying the spot where only last week I sowed seeds. On those mornings I am waiting for signs of movement or change. I am singularly focused on time and light, willing myself to develop infrared vision to see through the soil to the warmth of a germinating seed.

Gardener to gardener I know well the fascination, trouble, and obsession with gardening that shapes this book. There are questions that nag, a certain desire to explain ourselves to ourselves. How has the space and structure that is a garden existed through time? Is this a site of destruction or creation? Is it a kind of wild practice deeply attuned to seasonal rhythms? Or a sentimental domestication project against nature?