In the hot summer of 2020, during the Covid pandemic, Olivia Laing and her husband Ian moved from Cambridge to a beautiful Georgian house in a Suffolk village and began work on restoring the neglected, extensive walled garden behind it. She was vaguely aware that the garden had been owned and loved by the well-known garden designer and plantsman Mark Rumary, who had died in 2010. He had been the landscape director for the East Anglian nursery of Notcutts, and I remember him as a genial man overseeing extensive, award-winning tree and shrub exhibits at the Chelsea Flower Show in the 1980s.
I once owned a copy of the Notcutts Book of Plants, written by him, which was an indispensable reference book for garden designers before the advent of the internet. Many of the plants that Laing discovered, as she painstakingly cleared the rampant perennial weeds, such as hardy hibiscus, corkscrew hazel, Akebia quinata, Yucca filamentosa, Lavalle’s hawthorn, Rosa ‘Blanc Double de Coubert’, were well described in the Notcutts book. The Garden Against Time is, at least partly, the story of how she discovered Rumary through his garden.
It is also part Covid reminiscence, part political polemic, part family memoir, part potting-shed diary, all skilfully interleaved. Lockdowns and the process of renovating the garden, give her leisure and the desire to interrogate the nature of gardens and, in particular, the meanings of Eden and Paradise. There are interesting, if sometimes overlong, essays on, inter alia, John Milton, John Clare, Derek Jarman, the Diggers, William Morris, Eliot Hodgkin and Andrew Marvell. Many follow well-trodden paths, but Laing has done useful archival research into the slave-owning Middletons who built Shrubland Hall, and her account of Iris Origo’s war in Italy, uplifting and sad in equal measure, may be unfamiliar to British readers.
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