Olivia Laing on the pleasures and possibilities to be found in the backyard

I have a dream sometimes, not often. I dream that I am in a house, and discover a door I didn’t know was there. It opens into an unexpected garden, and for a weightless moment I find myself inhabiting new territory, flush with potential.

Maybe there are steps down to a pond, or a statue surrounded by fallen leaves. It is never tidy, always beguilingly overgrown, with the corresponding sense of hidden riches. What might grow here, what rare peonies, irises, roses will I find?

I wake with the sense that a too-tight joint has loosened, and that everything runs fluent with new life.

For most of the years that I have had this dream, I didn’t have a garden of my own. I came to home ownership late, renting until I was forty, and only rarely in flats with outdoor space. The first of these temporary gardens was in Brighton. It was so narrow I could almost touch both fences at once, dropping away over the crest of the Downs in three precipitous terraces, culminating in a greenhouse with a rampant grapevine, inhabited by a golden-eyed toad.

I planted calendula there, pot marigold, which according to the sixteenth-century herbalist Gerard would “strengthen and comfort the heart very much”. I was training to be a herbalist and my head was full of plants, an entanglement of natural forms.

The study of botany was an education in looking. It made the ordinary world more intricate and finely detailed, as if I had acquired a magnifying glass that trebled the eye’s capacity. Each plant was so interwoven into human history that to study it was to tumble down a conduit through time. “The Wild Marigold is like unto the single garden Marigold, but altogether lesser; and the whole plant perisheth at the first approach of Winter, and recovereth itself again by falling of the seed.”

In Cambridge a decade later I planted salvias and broom, and remade the stinking pond, which in the spring was full of newts, swimming to the surface to exhale a silver ball of air. I lived on short-term contracts, with black mould on the walls, but the gardens made me feel permanent, or maybe instead brought me to terms with transience.

What I loved, aside from the work of making, was the self-forgetfulness of the labour, the immersion in a kind of trance of attention that was as unlike daily thinking as dream logic is to waking. Time stopped, or rather swept me up with it.

In my twenties, I’d read a list of rules for being, and was so impressed that I copied them into my little black notebook, which in those days was full of aphorisms and advice about how to be a person. The rule I liked best stated that it is always worth making a garden, no matter how temporary your stay. Perhaps they wouldn’t last, but wasn’t it better to go on like Johnny Appleseed, leaving draughts of pollen in your wake?

This is an extract from The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise by Olivia Laing (Pan Macmillan). Buy a copy here.

Or buy a copy from Blackwell’s here.

Olivia Laing is appearing at the Idler Festival.

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