Description

Finalist for the 2024 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction
Finalist for the 2024 Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing
A number one Sunday Times (UK) bestseller
A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice
A New Yorker and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2024
A Chicago Public Library Must-Read Book of 2024
An Oprah Daily “Most Thought-Provoking Book” of 2024

Drawing inspiration from the restoration of her own garden, acclaimed critic Olivia Laing takes readers on a fascinating exploration of the concept of paradise.

In 2020, Laing set out to revive an eighteenth-century walled garden in Suffolk, a once-thriving patch of land overtaken by time. As she worked to bring it back to life, she was confronted with a pressing question: Who has access to paradise, and how can it be shared before it disappears? To answer this, she journeys through both real and imagined gardens, from Milton’s Paradise Lost to John Clare’s poetry on land enclosure, from a wartime refuge in Italy to an opulent pleasure garden built on the profits of slavery. In examining these landscapes, she uncovers the often troubling cost of creating an earthly paradise.

Yet gardens are not only spaces of privilege and exclusion. They have also been sites of resistance and shared dreams. Laing explores the radical garden created by filmmaker Derek Jarman on the rugged shores of Dungeness, as well as the vision of a collective Eden championed by artist and writer William Morris. Throughout history, gardens have been places where alternative ways of living have flourished—experiments in community and resilience that may offer hope in the face of climate change.

Weaving together history, literature, and personal experience, Laing crafts a vivid and thought-provoking portrait of the garden as a space of beauty, innovation, and transformation. More than just a retreat from the world, it is a place teeming with life and possibility, buzzing with bees and heavy with pollen.

Includes nine illustrations.