The Garden Against Time: A Conversation with Olivia Laing

As part of The Wheeler Centre's 2024 Spring Fling program and in partnership with Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria, listen to an exclusive podcast interview with celebrated writer Olivia Laing, interviewed by Sophie Cunningham.  

Olivia discusses her new book, The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise, which moves between real and imagined gardens, exploring how new modes of living can and have been attempted amidst the flower beds. The result is a beautiful and exacting account of the abundant pleasures and possibilities of gardens: not as a place to hide from the world but as a site of encounter and discovery, bee-loud and pollen-laden.

Listen as you take a walk through the Royal Botanic Gardens, and experience first-hand the joy of wandering in nature.  

The Garden Against Time: A Conversation with Olivia Laing will be published as an episode of The Wheeler Centre podcast and can be accessed here now. Search for Wheeler Centre wherever you get your audio to subscribe and never miss an episode.

Presented in partnership with the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria. 

A Statement From Olivia Laing

'I think the greatest challenge facing us is climate change, and part of the antidote is to seriously question the culture of long-haul flights. The carbon cost of a return flight from the UK to Australia is 6.8 tonnes of CO2e, which is almost three times the maximum annual amount of 2.5 tonnes an individual can generate in order to prevent further climate change. I don’t think we can pretend we don’t know these things any more, and much as I would have loved to come and speak in person I don’t think artists have the right to ignore their impact on the planet, any more than anyone else does.'

In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore a walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work drew her into an exhilarating investigation of paradise and its long association with gardens. Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton’s Paradise Lost to John Clare’s enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Laing interrogates the sometimes shocking cost of making paradise on earth.

But the story of the garden doesn’t always enact larger patterns of privilege and exclusion. It’s also a place of rebel outposts and communal dreams. From the improbable queer utopia conjured by Derek Jarman on the beach at Dungeness to the fertile vision of a common Eden propagated by William Morris, new modes of living can and have been attempted amidst the flower beds, experiments that could prove vital in the coming era of climate change.

The result is a beautiful and exacting account of the abundant pleasures and possibilities of gardens: not as a place to hide from the world but as a site of encounter and discovery, bee-loud and pollen-laden.