Olivia Laing & Jon Day: The Garden Against Time

Drawing on her own experience restoring a walled garden in Suffolk, and moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton’s Paradise Lost to John Clare’s enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded by slavery, Olivia Laing’s The Garden Against Time interrogates the sometimes shocking cost of making paradise on earth.

Laing was in conversation with writer, critic and frequent LRB contributor Jon Day.