Olivia Laing

The birds are singing, and there’s a big bowl of ripe dark cherries on the table outside the back door of a garden in a picture-postcard village in Suffolk. I’m here just at the right moment, Olivia Laing tells me, for peak martagon lilies, with their abundant dark purple waxy petals and bright orange stamens.

A few weeks earlier, Olivia had taken part in the National Garden Scheme, which allows gardens up and down the country to open to the public to raise money for charities, including one that helps veterans retrain as gardeners. Word had quickly spread among the local garden communities and book clubs, and the garden was packed with people enjoying the early summer bedding, curious to see the garden many had read about. Within weeks of its publication in early May, Olivia’s latest book, The Garden Against Time, had topped the Sunday Times bestseller list. After a launch at the Garden Museum in London with a conversation between Olivia and the designer and writer Tania Compton, there had been festival appearances at Manchester, Charleston, Dublin and Hay and countless more book signings. All of a sudden, the garden in this sleepy Suffolk village was the NGS star attraction.

Olivia’s determination to restore the garden was in part a result of the relentless, polarising years of Brexit, Trump, Black Lives Matter and then Covid. After moving with their husband, the poet and academic Ian Patterson, just after the first lockdown in 2020, Olivia spent two years shovelling earth, moving plants that were being strangled by weeds, cutting out cankerous branches, chopping back damaged yews, restoring ailing hibiscus trees, pulling out bindweed and ivy, and digging two tonnes of manure into the dry, sandy soil. “Why I wanted to write this book and set it in gardens was that I felt like it was a way to change the conversation from that binary screaming-in-each-other’s-faces mode that social media has made so prevalent,” they tell me.

We met on a rare warm day in June, the sun blasting down onto the garden’s rampant borders. Olivia was dressed casually in a T-shirt and leggings, their crop of thick hair a little messy. They offered me a glass of apple juice and told me to help myself to the cherries.

When Olivia first saw the house, with its Madame Alfred Carrière roses rambling over the front like something from a kitsch Victorian painting, they already knew from the particulars the estate agent had sent that the garden had a great pedigree: it had been the home of the garden designer Mark Rumary, a name to be reckoned with in certain circles. He was for 31 years the chief gardener and landscape designer for the Suffolk-based Notcutts garden centres and the recipient of several gold medals at Chelsea Flower Show as well as three RHS Lawrence Medals – an unrivalled achievement, noted a loving obituary in his local garden group’s newsletter. It was quite a pair of gloves to fill.

But the garden had been left to its own devices since Rumary’s death in 2010. “Mark had planted these beautiful cherries, and then they just didn’t have a very long life-span. That yew was about twice the height but snapped.” Following advice to do nothing to the garden for a year and simply observe what happened, Olivia got to know the formal framework of connected spaces enclosed by walls and archways. But its ancient mulberry tree, the majestic cypresses, and a rambling fig Rumary had grown from a cutting from Vita Sackville-West’s garden at Sissinghurst had become smothered by nature’s chaos. “It was this sort of combination of amazing promise – especially when we first saw it in the winter – and then by the time we saw it in summer it was desolate and distressing,” Olivia says. “When Ian and I were looking back at the photos the other day, we were really shocked at how derelict it looked, but then most things have survived.”

They point out some of the original plants: the tree peony, the fig, the banksia rose that in April and May is a “waterfall of yellow flowers”. There’s a dark red Portland rose originating from the 18th century – “a survivor”; square boxes and hibiscus trees; astrantia with ruffs of greenish-white flowers that float around the garden; lady’s mantle and neon-violet Rozanne geraniums. Other plants that revealed themselves during the first year were hellebores, Iris unguicularis – suited to the sandy East Anglian soil – cosmos, colchicum, a carpet of cyclamen under the mulberry tree, snowdrops and opium poppies. Near the greenhouse, a patch of knautia had moved itself across a stretch of grass. “They all just jumped themselves into this space. I find it fascinating to see. I like plants going, Yeah, this works, I’m happy.”

At first, Olivia’s aim was to restore the garden true to Rumary’s original vision, particularly in the Pond Garden. They lifted almost every plant, dug in manure and replanted. But they weren’t striving for complete perfection. That would be too boring. “I wanted it to always feel when somebody walked in that it was just on the verge of slightly lost. Because that was the thing that felt so exciting.”

The Garden Against Time is the final part of a trilogy, along with The Lonely City and Everybody: A Book About Freedom. Olivia describes the books as a 21st-century riff on The Divine Comedy. The day after we met, they emailed me. “The way I’ve been seeing it is that Lonely City is a version of Purgatorio, about isolation and alienation and the pervasive sense of being trapped behind screens,” Olivia wrote. “Everybody is Inferno, a descent into the hell of bodily violence and hatred, as well as an attempt to consider ways out. And The Garden Against Time is of course Paradiso, investigating the fertile possibilities of paradise as well as its more sinister and exclusionary aspects.” They told me it felt like closure, “a total end”.

We had talked about how using the narrative of the garden has allowed them to write a book that is just as political and radical as their previous ones while appealing to a far more mainstream, perhaps unsuspecting audience than their usual readers. On the surface it’s about the restoration of a beautiful English country garden. But woven through the diary of digging and discovery are darker stories of slavery, stolen lands, injustice and utopian socialism. It is the mix of gardening and politics that has led to its success, they say. “I’ve been amazed by how responsive audiences have been to that – and especially older audiences that you wouldn’t expect to be are just furious about what’s become of the commons, the public realm, and want to have it back and want not to be careering into a climate catastrophe. It’s triggered endless conversations, not just on stage but in the signing queues. I don’t think anyone would have thought that this book would be a bestseller, let alone a number one bestseller. And it’s not just that it’s sort of pretty writing about gardens. I think it is exactly the same thing as why there’ll be a Labour landslide: because people want something different.”

Since they set out to restore the garden, they haven’t been too reverent. “This is Mark’s genius, dividing it up by these fantastic hedges,” Olivia says as we walk from the Lawn Garden, with its mown grass and colourful borders, through an archway in the yew hedge into the walled Pond Garden, with its rambling roses, the fig tree and a series of symmetrical box hedges perfectly clipped into cubes. “When we came the yew was really high, and it looked amazing. But it cast so much shadow that it had to be brought back down. But I really liked the sense that all the proportions were slightly odd and that you felt really small inside it.”

At the back of this garden are the coach house, which has been converted into Patterson’s library, crammed with books, and a small courtyard, where teas and an impressive series of Patterson’s perfectly baked cakes – chocolate and Victoria sponge – were served during the open gardens day. You can see why Olivia might be moved to plant him a garden, which they did in the most overgrown and neglected section, hidden at the back on the other side of the library. It was their gift to him and is the part of the garden which has undergone the biggest transformation. They removed the two dying cherries and replaced them with a rectangular pond planted with water lilies and irises. They also removed the bindweed, a lot of ivy and bamboo. “It was a nightmare. I mean, in a way thank God it was the lockdown, because I can’t imagine how we could have done it if we hadn’t been here every day.” The laurel tree that came from a cutting in Chopin’s garden and the medlar were left, along with a white Rosa “Blanc Double de Coubert”; shade-loving, fragrant skimmia; and a white peony. They added plants that had sentimental meaning – including a Rosa x cantabrigiensis bred from roses in the Cambridge University Botanic Gardens, where Olivia and Patterson used to walk. From the RarePlants website (only Google it if you have the next few hours free), they found fritillaries called “Eros” and “Saturnus” (the latter a reference to WG Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, which follows a journey through Suffolk and which Olivia references frequently throughout the book), yet to be bought. They added a statue of Eros, along with a quince and a crab apple tree and a Rosa “Complicata”.

Restoring the garden has been a hard slog. “It was really long, long days, moving huge amounts of rubbish, day after day. And that backbreaking approach to making something was really exciting. Because when you’re writing, that sort of labour is invisible. It is hard work, but you’re not physic-ally carrying things, you’re not pushing your body into wheelbarrows of two tonnes of muck that need to get spread and that you’re doing on your own.” After a decade of writing, it allowed Olivia something of a reset, though all the while The Garden Against Time was starting to take shape.

Writing and editing a book has similarities to creating a garden. When Olivia starts, they say, they write a proposal with an idea of each chapter and what’s in it. “I need things to overlap. And I need characters to intersect with each other. So when I build those lists they’re provisional.” For The Garden Against Time they didn’t have the usual access to archives and libraries because of lockdown, so instead they followed the paths that Rumary and those who knew him took them on (including commissioning their next-door neighbour John Craig, who remembered Rumary, to do a series of linocut illustrations). They used the garden as an archive. “It really was that sort of detective-story feeling. Because I had these enormous lists of all the plants that had been here at some point and then tried to find them, which you think would just be like, Oh, I’ll just go and find them in a day. But actually it took two years to really map and know where every plant was.”

Some of those plants were just given a prune. Others needed major surgery or to be moved to more suitable locations, out of the shade of trees that had become bigger than when Rumary made his original planting plan in the 1960s. Olivia points out the mulberry tree that has been there since the 17th century – though they suspect it’s only got another 100 years to live. “I’m sure it’s come down another foot or so in the past year,” Olivia says. “It’s slowly lying itself down. But it’s still producing loads of mulberries. It’s just the most gorgeous tree.”

On the other side of the Lawn Garden towards the house, you step over self-seeded Californian poppies rambling across the cracks in the paving stones to a small orchard. A path is mown through wild grasses under apple and plum trees and two magnolias, one growing very close to the house. Olivia later tells me they wish Rumary hadn’t planted it quite so close to the wall; it may eventually have to be removed. The magnolia is at the entrance to a greenhouse that leans against the side of the house. The window of Patterson’s study looks into the greenhouse, on whose neat staging stand some of Olivia’s treasured geraniums and pelargoniums. For the open day they had arranged a selection of specimens cut from the garden, each of them carefully labelled. It’s an idea they got from Sissinghurst.

Just as plants go in and out of fashion, so, too, approaches to gardening change. “There are photos of the borders in the Pond Garden from the 1970s, and you don’t get plants that height without using so much chemical fertiliser,” Olivia says. “It’s a different era of gardening. And they look superb; they look absolutely amazing. But it’s not how I’m interested in gardening. I’m sure Mark wouldn’t be by now,” they add. Instead of using pesticides, Olivia confesses to squashing pesky lily beetles with their shoe.

Rumary’s book, The Dry Garden, published in 1994, was in fact ahead of its time. “It feels like it foresaw so much of ecological gardening,” Olivia says. In it, Rumary mentions the pair of Italian cypress trees in the Pond Garden, which at the time were four metres tall. They had been propagated from seed from a tree in a local churchyard which was itself “the offspring of a tree in the Garden of Gethsemane”. That was typical Rumary – to be so interested in the provenance of his plants; those he chose often had amazing genes. It’s partly why this garden served so well as Olivia’s research archive. The beds on either side of the cypresses are planted with a froth of cornflowers, geraniums and campanula, spiked with a series of foxgloves, silvery cardoons and alien-looking phlomis, among other things. Elsewhere in the garden are patches of impressively high nettles and the odd dandelion, which seems slightly defiant.

Olivia says they are not interested in the “painting-by-numbers” approach to gardening or the fashionable plant of the moment. They revel in the variegated leaves of a cornus that bounce the light, despite having been told by a friend that variegated leaves are vulgar. They have brassy red geraniums alongside their favourite pink geranium, “Frank Headley”, which also has variegated leaves (they later discovered it was Rumary’s favourite too). Another plant Olivia always has is the candy-pink-striped Rosa mundi, beloved of the filmmaker, activist and gardener Derek Jarman.

The planting itself has not cost them a lot. Many of the original plants survived being dug up and replanted. The most expensive things were the pond and stones in the Library Garden, and Olivia says the book has paid for those. They do most of the maintenance themselves, with help just once a month from Matt Tanton Brown, who knows the garden from when Rumary was alive and does jobs that require going up a ladder. When we met, it was almost time to start ordering bulbs, which will arrive in October. In the new year they order seeds. “I might buy an occasional plant, but I’m more giving plants away at this point,” they say. “Loads of people gave me stuff when I started, and there’s that feeling that a garden is a library as well. And this is a library with some really interesting objects. And then it’s nice to be able to share them, and you have that sense of plants that are kept going.” Tanton Brown is involved in Suffolk Plant Heritage, a group that works to conserve garden flora, “and that’s all done by people taking cuttings, people passing things on, which I think is a kind of activism,” Olivia says. “I’m sure they wouldn’t describe themselves as activists, but they are. They’re keeping rare breeds going with this diligent passion.”

As Olivia guides me through the garden, with its topiary and corkscrew hazel tree, electric blue dragonflies whirring around us, it feels sweet and safe and comfortable – a world away from their life in the 1990s as an anti-road protester. Back then, they lived in trees and dug tunnels to lie in to stop bulldozers destroying ancient woodland and natural habitat to make way for roads and bypasses. They remember digging an unshored tunnel to lie in at a camp on Stringer’s Common on the outskirts of Guildford as an experience too terrifying to repeat. “A lot of that life was really dangerous physically. It was amazing that nobody died living in trees. We had climbing harnesses, but part of the power of being in the trees or being in tunnels as protest is that it’s precarious and the protester’s body is vulnerable. That’s how it works; it’s expensive to remove them. And I think it felt really import-ant. That protest was successful. The common is still there, which is amazing.”

That period of activism seems relevant again at a time when it seems impossible to visit a gallery, watch a ballet or attend a literary festival without being interrupted by a protest of some sort. “It feels like suddenly it makes sense to people,” Olivia says. “They understand it, they are interested in it, they think it’s a good thing. But that wasn’t true 10 years ago. People thought it was kind of embarrassing. Now younger people, post-Greta, have that kind of context. Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion, all of those things have made people understand that this is a valid way of trying to change things. But all the knowledge that we had then was ignored or mocked or regarded as ridiculous.”

Almost three decades on, Olivia’s garden feels very established in every sense of the word, and in its soil there is a wealth of experience and a history stretching right back to the mulberry tree planted during the reign of James I. I wonder where it leaves the younger generation, who have no hope of even owning a ledge where they can plant a window box, let alone a patch of earth where they can sow seeds. Surely this world of gardens is just as exclusionary as it has ever been in terms of both age and class. Olivia is more optimistic. “People overall have an enormous amount of garden space. The majority of the population has access to a garden, which means we all have this power to change our relationship with the natural world.” And gardening is something everybody can do. They see no distinction between their Suffolk garden and the guerrilla gardening they did as an activist. “From the time

I was 14 on, gardening meant Derek Jarman,” Olivia says. “So it always meant something counter. It always meant something that was done for free or very cheap. It was inventive and innovative and rebellious.”

Olivia first discovered Jarman’s memoir Modern Nature through their younger sister, Kitty, who was an early devotee after seeing his film Edward II on Channel 4. “She was incredibly cool,” Olivia says. “She read The Face from about 10. She was obsessed by Derek Jarman. And I guess it just made sense to us as a family. We had this sense of being very beleaguered” – they lost their home when their mother, who was gay, was outed, and again when they were escaping her alcoholic partner – “and there was Derek, like, shining his radiant light and going, ‘There’s another world, there’s another way of being.’” Olivia could never have imagined as a teenager that they would one day write the introduction to the 2018 edition of Modern Nature.

This idea of other ways of being threads through Olivia’s work and life. In Everybody they write, “I can still feel my school years in my body, every muscle clamped and clenched, defended against discovery of the so-called family situation, let alone my own sense of being at odds with my gender; not a girl at all but something in between, as yet unnamed.” Olivia identifies as trans. They write about plants as having queer characteristics, and about gardens like Jarman’s in Dungeness and the one at the extraordin-ary Benton End, not far from them in Denham, Suffolk. Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines, an eccentric couple, opened the house in 1939 as a refuge for the bohemian and disaffected, including gay men who had been arrested and imprisoned for their sexuality. Morris bred irises – about 90 varieties – and Olivia chose one of them, “Benton Olive”, which they write appears to glow, for their own garden. (It was cultivated by Morris’s friend Beth Chatto, who became famous for her innovative dry garden.)

It is stories like that of Benton End – currently going through its own process of being restored by the Garden Museum – that Olivia collects and tells through their books, filling their readers’ brains with lists of things to look up, visit, watch and even listen to. Everybody had me searching YouTube for Kate Bush’s video of “Cloudbusting” (starring the late Donald Sutherland) and adding Nina Simone’s dystopian song “22nd Century” to my Spotify playlist. The Garden Against Time inspired me to rewatch the 1980s TV production of Brideshead Revisited, which was set in Castle Howard, with its formal landscaped gardens, and to order a secondhand copy of The World My Wilderness, the 1950 novel by Rose Macaulay, with its descriptions of the fertile wild gardens that sprang up in the bomb sites of
postwar London.

Olivia’s books are a springboard for further investi-gation, and their own research is extensive and jumps around much like the plants in their garden. Their friend Conor Donlon, who runs Donlon Books in east London, asked Olivia to curate a shelf of books for the launch of The Garden Against Time. I ask for three recommendations. They give me four. “John Barrell’s books about the enclosure [The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730–1840; The Dark Side of the Landscape] are incredibly eye-opening,” they say. “Obviously Modern Nature.” They add News from Nowhere by William Morris. And a book they are currently reading, Braiding Sweetgrass, by the botanist and ecologist Robin Wall Kimmerer. “You have to invite people into a relationship. And once they care about something and see the beauty in it, then they protect it,” Olivia says. “And that’s what I was trying to do with the gardening book, with this spell of the beauty of plants.”