Olivia Laing and the politics of the garden

via Olivia Laing Garden Against TimeThe garden has become more than a shelter, it has become a living battlefield of beauty, class and conscience, writes Dr Rosemary Sorensen.

GARDENING IS HEALTHY, good for your mind and body, and a sensible and valuable way to spend your time.

Yes, all of this is true, but still…

Reading Olivia Laing It makes me miss TV shows with cheerful presenters gesticulating woodenly over a compost pile to try something a little more artsy on gardening.

Do we have the equivalent of Olivia Laing, who you think can’t clean her teeth without thinking about the history, literature and social meaning behind the activity?

Late ABC TV presenter Peter Cundall It was cheerful and practical, and hinted at the moral philosophy behind his passion for plants. Without exaggerating his words, he seemed to want to show – by doing – how much social good depends on understanding our relationship with cultivated nature.

At the other end of the scale of Australian celebrity gardeners are those for whom it’s all about expensively achieved aesthetics; the super-famous “gardener” who runs the business without getting his hands dirty.

Publishers will point out how well the flashy gardening book sells, featuring spectacular views that require a bulldozer, truckloads of soil, a crew of workers and enough seedlings to revegetate an entire suburb. The marketing gang will say that’s what people want. Numbers don’t lie (of course they do, but never mind).

It is true that Laing is no ordinary writer. More than half a dozen books – to the riverAbout walking the length of the Ouse Virginia Woolf drowned, in an extraordinarily strange way Crudoreimagining artistic life Kathy Acker – nearly perfecting a writing methodology that combines social and personal history with critical analysis, both historical and contemporary. He has a seemingly easy ability to tell us stories that move smoothly down an interesting path, pausing to draw our attention to things we might otherwise have overlooked.

One minor negative: Laing’s Garden Against Time There are numerous lists of botanical names of plants that may be useful to those wishing to create a garden in Suffolk, where he currently lives. Botanical names have a poetic lilt when strung together like beads, but Laing’s list becomes tedious with an otherwise gripping account of how he and his partner Ian bought a house with a neglected garden that turned out to have been created by a well-known gardener.

The first of Laing’s literary historical references occurs when he describes how they saw the house and its neglected garden, immediately decided that was what they wanted, and then did something like this: Milton’s statement The people of the world, hanging on a chain, had to put their plans on hold due to the COVID years. This delay gives him time to research and read about how it happened. Mark Rumary He created this garden, which was the only one he designed for himself out of the many gardens he was commissioned to create.

At this point, he makes his first observation about the garden as a field of social analysis. During the COVID years, growing plants for food and recreation has become a major activity in the UK, as in Australia. At the same time, large gardens with limited public access have become symbols of class inequality, bringing to the surface the debate about whether it is acceptable to “politicize” the desire for and creation of beautiful gardens that require wealth, privilege, and often only exist through the exploitation of oppressed people.

A rich and productive line of inquiry is opening up, seemingly by chance (the challenges of COVID lockdowns), handled with the well-researched curiosity that is a hallmark of Laing’s writing. He decided to aim to restore Rumary’s garden as part of his project. ‘Explore both garden stories: to count the cost of building paradise, but also to look back and see if I can find versions of Eden that are not built on exclusion and exploitation, but can accommodate ideas that will be vital in the difficult years ahead.’.

We travel with Laing not only to Milton’s version of the prolifically tended Garden of Eden, but also to the great classical English gardens he designed. Talent Brownthen to a looser style William Morris‘ inspirations.

Laing disdains the rigid, plant-punishing formality of the famous Brown garden style: he also describes the wider social consequences of these estates. The idea was to clear the landscape; This meant relocating huts and even entire villages, chopping down trees, installing picturesque ponds, and basically destroying the land beyond everyone’s reach.

From his childhood until his late days, Laing visited some of these “landscaped” gardens with his father. One of them, Ditchingham, remembers from recent times WG Sebaldextraordinary Rings of Saturnand it turns out that after a severe storm destroyed trees in the park, Mark Rumary was called in to repair the damage.

He discovers this and then goes back to read the chapter. Rings of Saturn Sebald’s journey through this part of Suffolk and his visit to Ditchingham allows Laing to clarify what troubled him about the ideal garden planned by the very rich and powerful.

Laing writes:

That fall, I was reading John Barrell’s illuminating book The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place with Sebald, and together they were opening my eyes to a network of power relations not so hidden in the landscape but expressed through it.

An entire ruling class ideology was embodied in this particular version of paradise.

It could be argued that this ideology has been democratized in Australia. The right to a backyard with a front lawn full of rose bushes, a vegetable garden and space for the Hills Hoist, as well as a mini cricket pitch, was a big part of the Aussie family legend. The house itself wasn’t that important, until, with the postwar shift from “British values” to American influences via television, the need for a courtyard evolved into the need for a breakfast bar and “family” room. Can you think of a single American sitcom where someone gardens?

Open Garden programs that are so popular are a mixed blessing that is certainly not without its merits, as people who love gardening get to show off the fruits of their labor to other people. I visited Paul Bangay’s Stonefields One such open garden was in a garden near Kyneton on a weekend before I sold it, and it was a mess, from the rows of expensive cars in the makeshift paddock park to the manicured terraces around the glassed-in house. It is the modern equivalent of aristocratic property, an expensive fantasy intended to be unattainable except for the very wealthy.

Not gardening. This is a crude representation of fame and money.

Even in his garden, which Laing has worked hard to restore, literally getting his hands dirty, and for which he is grateful to have been able to afford this place and this garden through his own work and good luck, the expense of the enterprise is prohibitive. However, reading research on the writings of historical figures such as the 19th century poet John Clare It enables him to describe the difference between the garden built to maintain social superiority (which is what I felt at Stonefields) and the garden created to nurture not only nature but also both moral and physical well-being.

In fact, Laing is incorporating his rediscovered garden in Suffolk into a prestigious, charity-supporting open garden programme. He enjoys what he says is the best day of his life, when the garden is adorned with exquisite flowers and people gather for afternoon tea, surrounded by the fruits of his labor. It seems like everything comes together to prove the positive value of a beautiful garden.

But then drought strikes in the British summer and he watches everything wither and agonizes over the moral dilemma of using water in the garden. The idea of a garden is changing their thinking about what it is for and its relationship to humanity’s place in the natural world.

Laing, who digs and turns the fields of history as well as his own garden soil, does not use gardening as a metaphor, but places gardening in human behavior and on a map of the mind and soul. Seasons change and with the passage of time come different needs and challenges. Behaviors that best and most ethically adapt to these needs and challenges, Garden Against Time.

From the greedy English land barons who had more than they needed but kept getting more, to the Italian Origos who responded to the hideous devastation of the First World War by turning their homes and gardens into shelter, Laing finds in these examples: Derek Jarman (he wrote a book about it and Garden on the gravel banks of Dungeness It is revisited many times in this book and throughout Milton’s writings, a fertile ground for reflection. Meanwhile, he moves the story along in time with descriptions of his work in the garden, as well as a subplot about his father and his health problems.

Borrowing from a contemporary of Milton’s, Laing begins to think: Andrew MarvellBut the garden is a clock ‘it moves in unpredictable ways, sometimes coming to a complete halt and always proceeding cyclically, in a long, unraveling spiral of decay and fertility’. Learns to recognize this ‘A fantasy of perpetual abundance’ It is a dangerous illusion.

As he tries to make his own garden both more durable and less perfect, he turns what he has learned into a survival manifesto:

Parks instead of new airports, highway dedications, a major reinvestment in our public resources, the understanding that gardens, like libraries and hospitals, are what make all our lives possible. If we are to survive, we need gardens and the life they support to be established everywhere, and these gardens must go beyond the private sphere to form part of the common wealth while retaining their friendly and unruly qualities where individual creativity can flourish.