## Metadata - Author: [[Olivia Laing]] - Full Title: The Garden Against Time - Category: #books ## Highlights - A garden, a parkland might look more innocent, even virtuous, than a statue of a slave-trader, but they too have a hidden relationship with colonialism and slavery. It isn’t just that many of our familiar garden plants, from yucca and magnolia to wisteria and agapanthus, are imported ‘exotics’, a legacy of a colonial-era mania for plant-hunting. Slavery also provided the capital for a concerted beautification of the landscape, as the grotesque profits from sugar plantations were used to found lavish houses and gardens back in England. To certain audiences, this discussion was intolerable, politicising what they believed should be neutral, a beautiful haven from debate. They didn’t want to question the cost of building paradise, or to have the cosy charm of the so-called heritage landscape undermined. To others, it made the garden a tarnished, even contaminated zone, a source of unquestioned privilege, the gleaming fruit of dirty money. Personally, I thought that while the spell of the garden does lie in its suspension, its seeming separation, from the larger world, the idea that it exists outside of history or politics is not a possibility. A garden is a time capsule, as well as a portal out of time. ([Location 169](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJGDC7B3&location=169)) - As Toni Morrison once observed: ‘All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in.’ ([Location 180](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJGDC7B3&location=180)) [[The enclosure movement laid the basis for capitalism]]([Location 184](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJGDC7B3&location=184)) - they exist on the threshold between artifice and nature, conscious decision and wild happenstance. Even the most manicured of plots are subject to an unceasing barrage of outside forces, from weather, insect activity and soil microorganisms to pollination patterns. A garden is a balancing act, which can take the form of collaboration or outright war. This tension between the world as it is and the world as humans desire it to be is at the heart of the climate crisis, and as such the garden can be a place of rehearsal too, of experimenting with inhabiting this relationship in new and perhaps less harmful ways. ([Location 201](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJGDC7B3&location=201)) - I wanted to explore both types of garden stories: to count the cost of building paradise, but also to peer into the past and see if I could find versions of Eden that weren’t founded on exclusion and exploitation, that might harbour ideas that could be vital in the difficult years ahead. Both of these questions felt very urgent to me. We were poised on the hinge of history, living in the era of mass extinction, the catastrophic endgame of humanity’s relationship with the natural world. The garden could be a refuge from that, a place of change, but it can and has also embodied the power structures and mindsets that have driven this devastation. ([Location 214](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B0CJGDC7B3&location=214))