A blend of memoir, history and politics, this is an enthralling book perfect for spring
Olivia Laing is the author of several successful non-fiction books, as well as the experimental novel ‘Crudo’ in Suffolk in 2020 and spent two years restoring its walled garden, Olivia Laing wants you to know that she knows she is lucky.until I was 40,” she writes before explaining that she was able to buy the Suffolk house due to “a surge of good fortune” which involved falling in love with and marrying the poet Ian Patterson who shared her enthusiasm for.
Laing acquired her lifelong passion for gardens in unhappy circumstances. “Many people have lost a paradise,” she writes in a passage about how, when she was at primary school in Buckinghamshire the 1980s, her mother was outed as gay.
She intersperses her account of transforming her own garden with mini-essays on the writers she read during this period, including John Milton, William Morris and Derek Jarman, whose was about creating a garden at Dungeness after he was diagnosed as HIV positive. Laing used this formula – combining her own story with critiques of relevant artists and thinkers – in earlier works and, for the most part, it is effective. Near the end, however,becomes disjointed with an excursion to wartime Italy which feels tacked on. Sometimes too the connections between Laing’s emotions and world events come off forced. “I’d been thinking so much about war and then on 24 February Russia invaded Ukraine…” she writes, a little glibly.
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