From the walled arcadia of Fenton House and Garden at the Idler Festival, author and activist Olivia Laing spoke with Tim Richardson on why it is that the radical English soul resides in the plots we make outside our homes

This was the first event on the Sunday of the Idler Festival 2024. On stage were Tim Richardson, the Idler’s learned art critic. Tim is the author of a huge pile of books on gardens and homes. Till recently he ran the Chelsea fringe garden festival and has edited garden magazines. He knows a lot about gardens. Olivia Laing’s latest book is The Garden Against Time. It’s the story of her relationship with gardens, the idea of the garden and a specific garden she has worked on over the last few years.

Tim Richardson You’ve been interested in gardens and gardening for an awfully long time. When reading The Garden Against Time, we can detect this very, very quickly. Can you give us a bit more of that background?

Olivia Laing This is the absolutely perfect setting for this conversation but also for that specific question. My parents divorced when I was quite small and my father’s way of spending time with us as children was to take us to gardens exactly like this and indoctrinate us into the pleasures of the English landscaped garden and the English stately home garden.
So we would spend every other Saturday or a weekend a month walking around gardens. And that sounds like quite a boring thing to be doing with children. And I think at the beginning we were very interested in the teas and in the shop. But then the gardens started to become these places of possibility.
My dad was very keen on knowing the names of everything. He’s the sort of person who walks around the garden with a little black book and a pen, scribbling down plant names. And one of the ways of engaging with him, slash competing with him, was to know the names of things and to be able to say, “I think you’ll find that’s Verbascum ‘Christo’s Yellow Lightning’.”

TR So you knew Latin names as a child?

OL Some, yeah. And then later I trained as a herbalist so that expanded my knowledge of plants. I went to university to study English literature. I dropped out to become involved in environmental activism and road protests, and then came back. I had five years of biochemistry, anatomy and physiology, but in particular, and probably most enjoyably, botany and Materia medica. It was a grounding in plants that isn’t horticultural. It’s not like training to be a gardener or a garden designer. But nonetheless, it teaches you how to identify plants.

TR And at that period – I don’t want to say you were in the wilderness, because obviously you weren’t – but you were in a sort of wilderness when you were living on road protests and then on this extraordinary feminist commune called Hecate…

OL Yes and all of that repertoire of nineties ecological activism, all of which was really interesting. Probably the most extreme part of that wasn’t Hecate. I came off the road protests – living in tree houses in imperilled woodlands that were going to be destroyed for road building. And I became involved in a group called the Natty Trust, which was about making gardens on derelict land. And one of these places was an abandoned pig farm, outside Brighton. There was going to be a whole community there, but in the end it was just me. I spent a very strange winter there. I built a bender, which is a structure that you make out of hazel – it’s a sort of very rough-and-ready tent. And I spent an odd winter living like that.

TR You’ve written quite a lot about this period of your life, when you were moving home all the time, and then living in different rented accommodations. But always gardening there, if there was a garden.

OL I think people do share that idea that gardening is a way of making yourself feel rooted to the place you’re in and resisting or softening that experience of transience. The Garden Against Time is about the first garden I have ever owned, and it definitely comes from the perspective of understanding what it’s like to live inside Generation Rent; what it’s like to have terrible landlords, and to constantly be evicted, but still to desire that sense of richness and plenitude that comes with the garden. And I think it’s also about the idea that the garden doesn’t have to be an expensive thing. Gardens can be made from seed. You can make a garden out of very little.

TR Your mantra was: “it’s always worth gardening.”

OL Sometimes I was living in caravans, but I still made the place more beautiful. Rented places can be very anonymous – you can have that feeling that you’re just passing through and you’re untethered. The garden is a way of resisting that.

TR Landlords might not like you putting posters on the wall. But they don’t complain if you do a bit of gardening, do they?

OL I did have a landlord who complained and said, “We’re going to have to fill that pond in when you leave!”

TR How did you come to be living in rural Suffolk?

OL After living in New York, the subject of my book The Lonely City, I’d come back to England. I was living in Cambridge, and I ended up marrying a poet called Ian Patterson. And when he retired, we thought, let’s find somewhere together with the potential either to make, or in particular to restore, a garden. I felt very strongly that I wanted to restore a garden, for reasons that were at the time not wholly clear to me.
So we were looking at various places. And we ended up coming across a description online of a garden in Suffolk. It was the former home of the well-known Suffolk garden designer, the head designer at Notcutts, Mark Rumary. He was a professional garden designer who had been making stately home gardens across England. He had been making gardens for the Jordanian royal family. But this was his own garden. It was the only garden he ever made for himself. And he describes himself as a sort of Jekyll and Hyde. The designer, the person who wants to have a beautiful layout and be very restrained and elegant, is continually overtaken by the plantsman in him, the person who just wants to grow everything and cram it all in.
It was immediately apparent when we first saw it that it had been a loved place, full of rare plants, beautifully structured, very Arts and Crafts style, but absolutely neglected and untended. Ivy and dead trees everywhere. And you know, it was the secret garden. It’s this idea of a lost garden that runs so deep through our literature, our culture, and especially our children’s literature. It was just immediately beguiling to me.

TR I suppose, in a way, it’s the most familiar story in garden writing, isn’t it? The idea of what Dickon in The Secret Garden calls “waking up a garden”. It’s the idea that you’re going to push through a door and find something. You’re going to transform the garden and in the process, you will be transformed.

OL But also the reverse: when the gardener who makes the garden inevitably dies, and then the garden lives on, but in a strange state.

TR So you are attracted to the idea of taking on a garden made by somebody else, not just anyone else, but someone who is somebody in the world of gardens. Mark Rumary occupies an interesting position of being a designer for the nursery, which is very common in the early to mid century. And were you having conversations with the ghost of Mark Rumary?

OL Absolutely. And inevitably. The first year was the watch-and-wait year. I was really just looking at what was there and deciding whether it was worth keeping or not. But in the second year, I very much tried meticulously to restore Mark’s garden. I assembled huge lists of what plants had been there. I talked to all kinds of people in Suffolk, who remembered him, who knew him well. And it was my lockdown project to recreate it as meticulously as I could. Having done that, I sort of broke away and in the third year I did things that perhaps he wouldn’t have done. It’s definitely wilder at the edges. I introduced a lot of plants that I like. But there are people who remember him still in the village. They come around and assess and the consensus so far is that Mark would be pleased. So far.

TR You mentioned lockdown and one of the quite oddly refreshing things about the book is that you do mention the pandemic. It’s kind of become a taboo, in cultural discourse, to talk about it. Everyone is sick of it. Everyone was affected but everyone hates it. But you’ve deliberately brought it into the book. And you make lots of points in the book about how the garden, any garden, is a political space. This is related to the essential message of the book, which is that the garden is not a capsule in and of itself with a high wall around it. It’s of the world, and of the community. And obviously the planet as well. What about that political element to it?

OL This is an incredibly political book, in the way that all of my books are very political. But it’s a political book deliberately situated in a garden, in the hope of moving what I think has become a frustratingly binary, very strident, and sort of painful and quite boring discussion between left and right. I wanted to find a way to get past that binary and to find a way of talking about these ideas of exclusion, exploitation, the difficult past and the possibilities of the future, with more depth and more thoughtfulness.

TR I’ve tried to annoy audiences by saying things like, “every garden is a political act and every plant is a political prisoner.” Which makes Kew Gardens into a kind of Guantanamo Bay. Now let me read an extract from the book:
To certain audiences, this discussion was intolerable, politicising what they believed should be neutral, a beautiful haven from debate. They didn’t want to question the cost of building paradise, or to have the cosy charm of the so-called heritage landscape undermined. To others, it made the garden a tarnished, even contaminated zone, a source of unquestioned privilege, the gleaming fruit of dirty money. Personally, I thought that while the spell of the garden does lie in its suspension, its seeming separation from the larger world, the idea that it exists outside of history or politics is not a possibility. A garden is a time capsule, as well as a portal out of time.
You capture there some of the ambivalence of the garden: this idea of escape, but also confrontation.

OL It’s a book that really assesses the ways in which gardens have been involved in practices of exclusion and exploitation. But then the second half of it is really about other kinds of paradise – renegade utopias, paradises of possibility, gardens that were havens from war, gardens that were havens from homophobia. So it’s not just a critique of the “grand garden”. And personally there are many grand gardens that I enjoy, even as I remain alert to their politics and costs. I think you can do both.

TR Obviously, this is what you’re making here: a paradise. There’s a lovely quote from Derek Jarman, who’s clearly very important to you. He once said or wrote that paradise haunts the garden. And in a way paradise haunts your book. It comes in through Milton, and many other writers. You call it the “rumour of paradise” at one point, because you’re a little bit circumspect about the concept of paradise and where it comes from.

OL It is so appropriate that we’re sitting in this space surrounded by beautiful plants, because you do have this sense of the garden as a paradise. And I think it’s good to be sceptical about that paradise – and who’s not allowed inside it. But at the same time, I don’t think that paradise and its possibilities should be ruled out for our own century. I think they’re important.

In the book, I look up the etymology of the word “paradise”. I’d assumed – as a good Catholic child – that paradise meant heaven, and any other sort of use of the word paradise was a metaphor based on heaven. Actually, it’s completely the other way around. Paradise comes from a Persian word from long before the foundation of Christianity. And it literally means “a walled garden”. And then it’s used in the Bible to describe heaven metaphorically, as the most beautiful place humans can imagine, which is a garden. It’s not the farm, it’s not a place that’s just about utility. It’s a place that’s about a surplus of beauty, of safety and of deep pleasure. So that sense that that’s at the core of our aspirations as a species is very exciting to me.

So how do we make the shared, inclusive, common? William Morris’s idea of paradise is a socialist paradise. It’s the reversing of the enclosures, it’s a returning of land to the people. He is part of an English subversive tradition that I think starts with the Peasants’ Revolt and continues through the Diggers and Levellers of the seventeenth century and the utopian socialism of the nineteenth. It continues through time. And it’s this ancient dream of being able to have land and room and space. An end to inequality. And I’m sorry, but that is my dream. It’s a dream of old-fashioned socialism, and it’s a dream of land that is shared equally.

This article appears in Idler #98.

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A Drink with the Idler

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