In Olivia Laing's new book, she describes her effort to restore—or better put, re-envision—a decrepit garden in Suffolk that was originally developed by the well-known author and garden designer Mark Rumary. But within a page or two Laing reveals herself to be a woman of wide reading, restless energy, and deep conscience. She finds herself unable to tell that simple tale without also asking herself questions about what a garden is for and why she is so keen on having one. This leads on to an examination not only of the things a garden includes within its enclosure but also the things, and people, it deliberately excludes.
I wasn't far into the book before it occurred to me that it's cut from the same cloth as W. G. Sebald's book-length meditations—Vertigo or The Rings of Saturn, for example—that wander here and there while keeping us mesmerized by the lugubrious tone, the casually shaped sentences, and the sense that great mysteries lie just beneath the surface. Laing's prose is more vigorous, less uncanny, but it's certainly up to the task, and she interweaves garden history and lengthy literary references adroitly, along with numerous details about her personal life the like of which Sebald would never mention.
A communitarian spirit runs through the book, consistent with Laing's earlier career as a herbalist and eco-activist. Among the duller parts of the book, along those lines, are the ones in which she exposes the slave-trading origins of the wealth that fueled many of the great landscape gardens of the seventeenth century. Yes, it's true. Yes, we get it. But perhaps we don't need to know quite so much about generation after generation of Jamaican plantation owners.
Among the literary figures she draws upon in the course of developing her thesis are John Milton, John Clare, William Morris, and Iris Origo. One reviewer found these interpolations tedious, preferring Laing's gardening exploits. I felt just the opposite. I skimmed quite a few paragraphs describing Laing's garden plantings, buoyed by the music of the language but entirely at sea regarding the specific plants she was mentioning. For example:
As bare patches were revealed I started to draw up embryonic planting plans. I wanted a group of Narcissus cyclamineus under the magnolia, the ones that look like Piglet with his ears blown back. Acid yellow, ballet pink. More hellebores under the hazel, the yellowy-green Ballard hybrids with a maroon splash at the eye, plus a fine blue mist of Anemone blanda under the tree peony, which had just opened an abundance of crumpled yolk-yellow petals. Irises everywhere. Dying plants were discarded and new plants took up their stations. A Rosa rubrifolia, dead as a doornail. Great mats of lamium that had conquered and pillaged the shadier border in the pond garden. A variegated euonymus, hideous anyway, and blocking two-thirds of the path. Arbutus, sick, ceanothus, deceased. In their place I planted more pinkish-green astrantia and Geranium psilostemon, Verbena hastata ‘Pink Spires’ and a mass of tawny heleniums. We got six goldfish, four orange and two black, and the garden instantly felt more animated and alive. The tulips went over, replaced by a wave of purple and white dame’s rocket, aqui- legia, purple drumstick alliums and the first glowing roses.
The eye trips along, but such passages don't mean much to me. On the other hand, I found the long section about the garden themes of Paradise Lost and Milton's persecution following the civil war to be fascinating, likewise the story of Iris Origo's Italian villa and the part it played harboring refugees and partisans during the Second World War. Laing praises Origo's courage while upbraiding her for maintaining the medieval mezzadria land management system on her vast inherited estates under which the workers had no opportunity to purchase the land they worked, generation after generation.
That aspect of gardening—its elitism and escapism, if you will—is one of the many themes that contribute to Laing's long meditation. But that being the case, it strikes me as strange that she never says a word about the financial arrangements that made it possible for her to buy an estate in Suffolk and spend two solid years investing heavily in repairing, rebuilding, and replanting it. Royalties from her previous books? I doubt it. Early on, she mentions marrying a Cambridge don named Ian. Do retired academics in England really make that much?
It's a minor point and does nothing to obscure Laing's intense curiosity about literature and history, her vast knowledge and love of plants, her concern about all manner of social inequality, or her desire to create a verdant enclosed landscape and oasis for herself. No book that I know of describes that process more richly.
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