The secret garden

The practice of making a garden is simple. Prime the soil, choose and arrange the plants, tend it, water it, enjoy it. The complications arise with the awareness of the cultural, environmental, and personal elements. Is it your land or are you renting it from a landlord? Is the soil tainted with lead or other contaminants after centuries of industrialisation? Are the plants you have selected meaningful to you or just modish markers of good taste and affluence? Will your curation withstand extremes of anthropogenic climate change or will the plants struggle and perish, become overgrown by the botanical bully boys that can adapt and dominate?

The Garden Against Time is an account of Olivia Laing and her husband, the poet Ian Patterson, buying a house in Suffolk in the south of England in 2020. Although they loved the house, the unkempt garden was the main attraction. It had been designed by a previous owner, Mark Rumary, a beloved local gardener and, as his executor observes, a gay man ‘when it wasn’t good to be gay’. He designed it as a series of rooms, intentionally never allowing the whole to be visible all at once, a ‘secret garden’ quality that Laing loved. Rumary had planted a wide variety of species and cultivars, many now hidden below the overgrown vegetation. Laing refers to ‘the strange intimacy that went along with repairing his design’. With each day of hard work clearing and renovating the space, she finds new plants that have struggled for many seasons in overcrowded darkness, ready to be revived.