Here I thought, all this time, that the biggest challenges in my personal gardening universe were persistent weeds, plant-eating bugs, scary invasives like bamboo and Japanese knotweed, bark-gnawing rabbits, assorted animal droppings, and the almost inevitable Canadian surprise frost.

I also thought, all this time, that I’ve done not badly over the past few decades in carving out a one-fifth acre space of foliage and blooms in which I, along with pollinators and birds, can enjoy the color and aroma of my labor and imagine a Monty Don voiceover describing it.

Then along came British author Olivia Laing with THE GARDEN AGAINST TIME, which easily is the most evocative and compelling book I have ever read about mindful horticulture and the healing properties of messing about in fertile soil. My garden brain felt as if it would explode with connections I’d never imagined.

"Olivia Laing’s far-ranging and far-reaching evocation of gardening is really about gratitude and stewardship, the reverent and persistent care of growing things that are good for all humans. If you read no other gardening book this year, do read this one."

Introduced as her story about buying a home in Suffolk where the centuries-old garden finally would be her own and where the simultaneous onset of COVID-19 ensured that a lot of time would be spent restoring it, the resulting book ended up encompassing a remarkable range of expression.

Of course, many others have ably, and sometimes brilliantly, explored the world of gardening through historical, sociological, philosophical, spiritual and nostalgic lenses. But Laing seems to do all of that with such seamless ease. You scarcely feel her giant leaps from place to place, or across centuries of time, in which gardens proclaimed far more complex meanings than they seem to in our present age.

Time is certainly the operative concept here, beginning with the title. Why against time? Does a garden strive to overcome the seasonal depredations of each passing year? Does it grow as an ever-changing witness, or backdrop, to history? Does it preserve previous gardeners’ horticultural legacies as ancient plantings grow alongside new ones?

As I followed Laing’s own journey of discovery through a space that had once been a botanical wonder belonging to the accomplished landscape architect Mark Rumary, I realized how her choice of title wording did indeed change color and inflection with each succeeding chapter. THE GARDEN AGAINST TIME encompasses both the minuscule and universal in human experience, and I learned how it truthfully cannot be otherwise.

So instead of compiling only a diarist’s account of two years’ worth of grinding hard work interspersed by moments of delight (which fortunately become more and more frequent), Laing spent rainy days, literally and metaphorically, poring through her library to discover deeper meanings behind the human urge to grow things that are food for the soul as well as for the table.

Interestingly, Laing delved most deeply into John Milton’s classic poem, “Paradise Lost,” to ruminate on the idea of Paradise itself and how the term has changed and fluctuated over the centuries. Her train of thought leads through many other historical gardens, both real and imagined, to question what gardens have said over time about their owners, designers or visitors.

Arts and Crafts movement icon William Morris saw gardens in terms of dutiful and purposeful design; gardener-poet John Clare gently weaponized his art against the evils of the Enclosures, where common land was expropriated by the wealthy; a terminal AIDS sufferer defied discrimination and disease in creating a garden along a stony beach; and the garden of an embattled wartime Italian villa provided both hope and sustenance in horrific times.

Throughout THE GARDEN AGAINST TIME, Laing reminds us (and herself) that if we think of gardens only as places of peace, quiet and beauty, we are missing their complicated influence as places of status, privilege, power, exclusion (literally, the enclosure of ancient common land), exploitation (literally, the use of slavery to create them), and so on.

Should those of us with the stability and resources, however frugal, to create and maintain gardens feel unfairly “privileged”? The question does come up, both subtly and directly.

But THE GARDEN AGAINST TIME ultimately isn’t about that. Privilege is too passive a word for any dedicated gardener. Olivia Laing’s far-ranging and far-reaching evocation of gardening is really about gratitude and stewardship, the reverent and persistent care of growing things that are good for all humans. If you read no other gardening book this year, do read this one.