The Garden Against Time: In Search Of A Common Paradise (Hardback)

What a wonderful book this is. I loved the enchanting and beautifully written story but also the fascinating and thoughtful excursions along the way - Nigel Slater

No one writes with more energy and ecstasy than Olivia Laing. This book is what we need right now: paradise, regained - Philip Hoare

This book is as imaginatively structured and full of beauties and surprises as the garden whose creation it documents. - Lucy Hughes-Hallett, author of The Pike: Gabriele D'Annunzio, Poet, Seducer and Preacher of War

An extraordinary and important work. I felt doubly alive after reading it. The book is an inspiration. - Celia Paul, author of Self-Portrait

Olivia Laing is my favourite non-fiction writer, and it is a joy to encounter her brilliant mind again in The Garden Against Time. It is a magisterial work, and the exacting sensuality of her garden writing is pure pleasure, delight, surprise. It is a triumph, from a writer at the height of her powers - Francesca Segal

Olivia Laing has written a book about making her garden, which is by turns lyrical, consoling, disturbing and inspiring. It’s a book for thinking gardeners everywhere - Mary Keen

Powerful, reflective and captivating to read - I loved it. - Fergus Garrett

A sharp and enthralling memoir of the garden’s contradiction: dream and reality, life and death, the fascination of cultivation and the political horrors that it can disguise - Neil Tennant

The most magical writing, intimate, insightful, learned and brilliant. - Jeremy Lee, restaurateur and author of Cooking: Simply and Well, for One or Many

Quite literally unputdownable. It is astonishing, funny, beautiful, wise, charming and truthful. - Jinny Blom, author of What Makes a Garden

Laing probes important questions about land ownership and exclusion and the human drive to create paradise on earth. All the while, her elegant prose bewitches and beguiles. A truly wonderful read. - Sue Stuart-Smith, author of The Well Gardened Mind

Olivia Laing’s exploration of cultivation and dispossession is both arresting and irresistibly lyrical, confidently yet modestly drawn from a life entwined with plants and a gift for compelling biography. A timely and necessary reappraisal of the garden and its boundaries. - Matt Collins, Head Gardener at the Garden Museum