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- The Garden Against Time
The Garden Against Time
ISBN: 9781529066678
Author : Olivia Laing
Published: 2024
Publisher: Macmillan International
Number of pages: 336
Language: English
Format: Hardback
Author : Olivia Laing
Published: 2024
Publisher: Macmillan International
Number of pages: 336
Language: English
Format: Hardback
Description
In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore a walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work drew her into an exhilarating investigation of paradise and its long association with gardens. Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Miltons Paradise Lost to John Clares enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Laing interrogates the sometimes shocking cost of making paradise on earth.
But the story of the garden doesnt always enact larger patterns of privilege and exclusion. Its also a place of rebel outposts and communal dreams. From the improbable queer utopia conjured by Derek Jarman on the beach at Dungeness to the fertile vision of a common Eden propagated by William Morris, new modes of living can and have been attempted amidst the flower beds, experiments that could prove vital in the coming era of climate change.
The result is a beautiful and exacting account of the abundant pleasures and possibilities of gardens: not as a place to hide from the world but as a site of encounter and discovery, bee-loud and pollen-laden.
But the story of the garden doesnt always enact larger patterns of privilege and exclusion. Its also a place of rebel outposts and communal dreams. From the improbable queer utopia conjured by Derek Jarman on the beach at Dungeness to the fertile vision of a common Eden propagated by William Morris, new modes of living can and have been attempted amidst the flower beds, experiments that could prove vital in the coming era of climate change.
The result is a beautiful and exacting account of the abundant pleasures and possibilities of gardens: not as a place to hide from the world but as a site of encounter and discovery, bee-loud and pollen-laden.
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