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The garden against time : in search of a common paradise / Olivia Laing.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: New York, N.Y. : W. W. Norton & Company, 2024Copyright date: ©2024Edition: First American editionDescription: 317 pages : illustrations ; 22 cmISBN:
  • 0393882004
  • 9780393882001
Subject(s): LOC classification:
  • SB455 .L35 2024
Online resources:
Contents:
A Door in the Wall -- Paradise -- A Landscape Without People -- The Sovran Planter -- Garden State -- Benton Apollo -- The World My Wilderness -- The Expelling Angel.
Summary: "In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore an eighteenth-century walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work brought to light a crucial question for our age: Who gets to live in paradise, and how can we share it while there's still time? 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 humming, glowing tapestry, 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"--
List(s) this item appears in: Garden of Ideas | Coping with Climate Change | Garden of Pride
Holdings
Item type Current library Call number Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Lending Books Elisabeth C. Miller Library Tall Shelves SB468.36.G7 L25 2024 (Browse shelf(Opens below)) Available 39352800198905
Total holds: 0

"First published in Great Britain in 2024 by Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan"--title page verso.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 305-312).

A Door in the Wall -- Paradise -- A Landscape Without People -- The Sovran Planter -- Garden State -- Benton Apollo -- The World My Wilderness -- The Expelling Angel.

"In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore an eighteenth-century walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work brought to light a crucial question for our age: Who gets to live in paradise, and how can we share it while there's still time? 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 humming, glowing tapestry, 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"--

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