The Garden Against Time

Olivia Laing and a side order of Alcatraz

I just finished reading Olivia Laing’s book, The Garden Against Time. After only a few pages I knew that this was going to be a book I wanted to write about. It’s crammed full of interesting and beautiful ideas. In short it’s a book about the garden of a house that Laing and her husband bought during lockdown and Laing’s efforts to make the garden her own whilst honouring its history and incorporating her own. In long, it’s a book about freedom and containment, nature and culture, colonialism and slavery. It’s also about love and beauty and finding a way to express those intangible things in a real, shifting and living way.

As well as exploring the history of her own garden, she looks at gardens through time, real and imagined and examines what they have to say to us and what they mean to her. I knew it was a winner when she compares the garden she discovers with the one from The Children of Green Knowe. I was obsessed with the Green Knowe books as a child and have plans to go on pilgrimage to the house, which actually exists. Not many people I know have read the books, so I am always over excited when I find someone who has. Especially someone I admire.

Laing is a spectacular writer. All her books come at you at a 45 degree angle from the norm, because that’s the way Laing sees the world and she is generous and clever enough to make sharing it with you seem effortless. I’m not a gardener. I don’t find solace in the soil, but I do find great satisfaction in reading the words of people who do, and who have interesting things to say about it.

I came to Laing through her book, Funny Weather (Art in an Emergency). Lockdown had just eased and the world was beginning to unfurl itself into the heat of a blistering summer. I had travelled to London to meet some friends and see the Tracey Emin/Edvard Munch exhibition. Before that, I had the whole morning to myself. I spent most of it flaneuring my way round the back streets of Belgravia. I grabbed a sandwich for lunch and ate it on the traffic island by Wellington Arch, which is much more glamorous than it sounds. It’s one of the chicest traffic islands I know. I spent ages looking at the war memorial statues there, which I have long been obsessed with thanks to Geoff Dyer’s, The Missing of The Somme, one of my touchstone texts for life.

After that I headed down Piccadilly to the Royal Academy, but as I was still early and as I was passing by Hatchards, it seemed rude not to go in. That’s where I picked up Funny Weather, because it looked interesting. It looked like my kind of book. Sitting outside the RA, waiting for my friends, I had already read fifty pages by the time they arrived. I made so many notes in my first copy, when it went walkabout after I thrust it upon one too many people who turned out to love it enough to steal my copy, I had to buy another. Now it’s another one of my touchstone texts.

When I think back to that whole day, it has a mythic quality to it, like something magical was happening in real time. Everything about it was perfect, the weather, the way I got to spend my time the way I like best, the paintings that punched holes in my heart, sharing that awe with friends, the silent communion with my friends the war memorials and then, discovering this woman who could write in a way that tapped into my heart and soul and had the generosity to share with me a whole bunch of things she knew I would love. And I did. And I do.

One of the things I knew that Laing would write about in The Garden Against Time was Derek Jarman’s garden at Dungeness. Jarman is as much a hero for Laing as he is for me and she writes about him with such affection and a sense of intimate importance that reading her on him is like the cherry on the top of a particularly delicious ice cream sundae.

One of the things she notes about Jarman’s garden is that it had no fences or borders. It is a garden that is both wild and tamed. It is a private space because it was made and expresses the thoughts and feelings of one man, but it is also open and generous in sharing that with other people. I have always loved that the garden is so much an expression of the place it was made in, but it is also fully an expression of the man who arrived as a stranger and made his home there. Jarman was interested in alchemy and I really think that the garden is pure, alchemical magic. It was created under incredibly difficult circumstances. The wild, salt filled, desert of shingle between a power station and the blunt force of the sea is not the first place you think of when you’re looking for solace and retreat, but it worked its magic on a difficult man in difficult circumstances and it made for a beautiful marriage.

The opening out into pain and transmutation of suffering into art which medicated Jarman’s last years is a very different thing from the clipped, formal gardens that Laing also writes about in her book. In writing about the history of English gardening, she does not shy away from the hidden cost of grand gardens. From the enclosure acts which maddened the writer John Clare as he watched the wild land he was once free to roam in diminish before his eyes, to the fortunes made from slavery and sugar that allowed for the great gardens of Capability Brown and his ilk to be created, she shows us beauty built on a different kind of human suffering.

It made me think of our visit to Alcatraz, a few weeks previously. I have been wanting to write about it, but not really knowing how to start and then I read Laing on the hidden cost of gardens and I knew this was how I wanted to talk about Alcatraz.

When we arrived on the island, we had to stand in a square while a man in a ranger hat stood on a box and lectured us about not falling into the sea. He also told us about the things we were going to see, which always seems weird, because we’re only here to see them. One of the things he said was that there was an exhibition called We Hold The Rock, about the Native American Indian occupation of Alcatraz for about nineteen months in the late Sixties after it had been decommissioned as a prison.

We found Alcatraz hard going. I just found it sad. I hated the way that the exhibition was skewed towards how great it was to be in prison. The food was considered the best in the prison system. Yay. The guards were firm but fair and weren’t allowed weapons to beat the prisoners with, but here is a case of some of the weapons that some of them used anyway. Yay? Here is a room full of pictures of the men who were incarcerated here and their list of crimes. One man protested against the First World War and spent two years chained to a pipe, standing up. One man stole sixteen dollars from a grocery store. He had a history of deprivation and abuse, couldn’t find any work and was starving, but you know, crime is crime. One man, they decided, was probably going to stir up trouble about racial equality. Another man was mentally ill and even in Alcatraz, everyone felt sorry for him. It’s hardly the bunch of dyed in the wool criminals you expect to find.

By the time we got to the We Hold The Rock exhibition I was done. I couldn’t bear the thought that it might be a performative sop to stop people making noises about diversity and inclusion. Judging from the ‘we’re doing this for your own good,’ vibe of all the exhibits thus far I thought I might just burst into tears if I read about how the Native Americans were not the right type of Native Americans to be given the right to live on a blasted rock in the sea, etc. So we skipped it and I did my own research when we got home.

I compared the We Hold The Rock story to what I discovered elsewhere online and found some interesting differences. Although the official account is respectful and broadly agrees with what I found elsewhere, it felt to me that there were a few moments in the account where it did point at the people who took the action not necessarily being the best people to have done it. It’s so subtle that I might just be being over sensitive and I don’t know enough about the history to be sure, but that’s what it felt like to me. I also note they left out my favourite bit of the story, which is from this account.

They claimed Alcatraz was theirs “by right of discovery,” but they sarcastically offered to buy it for “$24 in glass beads and red cloth”—the same price that Indians supposedly received for the island of Manhattan. The activists added that they didn’t mind that the island was underdeveloped or lacked fresh water, since most of them had already endured similar conditions on government Indian reservations.

In 1973, Alcatraz opened as a national park, which gives it protected status. The rangers were all keen to point out that all the birds and plants on the island were protected and that we must leave the island to them, because it is theirs. They are very strict that you take nothing with you as you leave, with the obvious exception of what you buy in the gift shop.

I thought about this a lot, after reading about how the government refused to negotiate with the Indians on Alcatraz, how the problems during the occupation were largely down to hippies, journalists and drop outs bringing drugs and alcohol with them and how things were eventually shut down when government forces cut off water and electricity supplies. I thought about the plea for Alcatraz to be turned into an Indian school, cultural centre and museum. I thought about how convenient it is to turn land that you don’t want to give to people into a national park, which is of course, morally unimpeachable. You’re giving all the people the land. Even better, you’re conserving the natural world. Surely that’s better? Except it makes my teeth itch.

I had had this feeling before I read Laing, but after I read about the gardens built on the sweat of slavery, violence and sugar and how invested people were and are in turning a blind eye to these things I understood the feeling. It’s rage.