Il giardino contro il tempo

"The Garden Against Time" is a book about lost paradises and those regained, about what we have done and what we can still do for our world: a work brimming with life, with pollen, with bird songs and with curious wild seeds. Olivia Laing is forty-two years old when, for the first time, she becomes the owner of a garden. It's a garden long neglected, as suggested by the knotted vines covering the red bricks, the rotting fruit trees, and the roses with faded colors. Until that moment, her botanical aspiration had manifested itself only in a recurring dream: a door leading to an unknown place, where she, weightless, finds herself living in a new territory, rich in potential. In reality, the task of caring for this enclosed space in Suffolk takes on the contours of a transformation. She herself narrates these years of rebirth and discovery - in which she experiences the consolation and satisfaction of gardening, but also the effort of reconstructing an immortal time, destroyed by Adam and Eve's betrayed promise in the earthly paradise. Moving between real and imaginary gardens, from the verses of Milton to the elegies of John Clare, from a war refuge in Val d’Orcia to the fertile vision of a total Eden by William Morris, Olivia Laing discovers that among the flowerbeds of daffodils and rosemary there are rebel outposts and the common dreams of all humanity are hidden.