Garden against time

Olivia Lang moved into an old house in 2020, a feature of which was the Royal Horticultural Society garden, laid out by the eminent gardener Mark Roumari. He created hundreds of gardens, but this was the only one he nurtured for himself. In the book, Lang talks about her struggle to restore this long-neglected garden, about her love of gardening and nature. But A Garden Against Time is not a plant care manual, and more than a book about gardening. Traveling through gardens, real and imagined—from Milton's Paradise Lost to John Clare's elegies, from a wartime asylum in Italy to a grotesque amusement park financed by slavery, from Derek Jarman's incredible queer utopia to William Morris's communal Eden—Lang explores the garden as a historical phenomenon and its long-standing associations with paradise, questions the sometimes shocking cost of creating such a paradise on earth, and explores the many pleasures and possibilities of gardens: not as hideaways from the world, but as places of encounter and discovery, full of beauty and fragrance.