While a cast of literary heavyweights grace Laing’s account of her garden restoration, the real joys lie in her detailed description of the pruning and the planting and the soothing effect on her state of mind
, is as fragrantly replete as a long border at its peak. The word that comes to mind is spumy: a blossomy, brimful excess that’s almost too much at times. Here are hundreds of plants, exquisitely described; here is colour, energy and expertise. In a way, it’s akin to a garden itself; a place, almost a park, in which the reader never quite knows what’s around the next corner.
But this narrative is mulched – somewhat buried at times – with deep thinking. When she’s not in her garden, pulling ivy from walls, Laing is in the library, dragging books from shelves. Among her cast of characters are John Clare, Iris Origo, Rose Macaulay,, she reads for the first time during the pandemic lockdown. Such writers bring her to consider all manner of notions of Eden, whether utopian or built on sweeping entitlement, whether lost or found. This territory is often predictable.
Laing restores her garden – two years’ labour, and she’s opening it to the public for charity – against a backdrop not only of Covid, a contested US presidential election and the outbreak of war in Ukraine, but also of anxiety-inducing events in her family. This brings the reader fully to feel the way autumn leaves, mud and seed catalogues may soothe a person, taking her out of her own head.
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