The Art of

Gardening

A dedicated gardener and writer, Olivia Laing was bound to find a way to bring the two together. That moment came in 2020, on the cusp of the Covid-19 pandemic, when they moved to a home in Suffolk with a walled garden originally planted by the landscape designer Mark Rumary in the 1960s. Tending to that space became the impetus for The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise (2024), a work that blends memoir and meditations on the aesthetic and especially political possibilities of cultivated landscapes.

Four years later, while touring The Garden Against Time, Laing turned to the subject once more, this time as coeditor with the artist Richard Porter of A Garden Manifesto (2024), a collaborative volume published by Porter’s Pilot Press, which brings together artists, writers, gardeners, and activists to reflect on the transformative potential of gardens.

Here, Salomé Gómez-Upegui speaks with Laing about the wisdom they’ve gained from working on these books and how writing has shaped their understanding of the ever-evolving relationship between gardens and the art world.

Salomé Gómez-UpeguiI’d like to start discussing A Garden Manifesto, the book you recently coedited with Richard Porter. You gathered thoughts on gardening from so many artists, writers, and activists for that book. What did it teach you about gardens as sources of inspiration?

Olivia LaingThe idea [for the book] came from a feeling I had that gardening was undergoing a shift from being purely decorative to becoming much more political, in ways that are environmental and ecological but also touching on class struggles, land struggles, and various forms of oppression.

People responded to our invitation really generously, sending in very beautiful work. One of the most exciting things was that we mixed material from 1970s land movements, like Salmon Creek Farm or Green Guerillas, with much more contemporary projects, such as the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library. It felt like there was a continuum between lots of different kinds of activism.

SGUWhen do you think the shift occurred, from gardens being valued primarily for their aesthetic appeal to becoming spaces with a more overtly political significance?

OLI think in the last ten years gardeners have begun focusing first on gardening for biodiversity, then on deeper questions like who owns the land, who has access, and whether we want to make gardens just for the rich, if we want them to be decorative spaces, or if we’re trying to do something more radical.

SGUAnd do you think artistic depictions of gardens have had anything to do with that shift? And to expand on that a bit, do you think historical depictions of gardens have influenced the way we view them?

OLAbsolutely. I think that’s such a big part of how we understand gardens. I talk about this a lot in The Garden Against Time. John Milton’s Paradise Lost has a deep influence on how we think about the dream or fantasy of Eden, and particularly the idea of Eden as a place of permanent abundance. That’s a very dangerous myth, which I think gardeners are still unconsciously seduced by today. They still think their gardens should be all abundance and no sign of death.

Tate did a show called Art of the Garden maybe twenty years ago, and they are now reissuing the catalogue, which is this fantastic hardback volume of gardens in art through the centuries. You see all these different ideological or political visions. There are moments when it’s very romantic to have a wild garden, and then there are particularly touching wartime gardens, where the idea of ruin has a totally different meaning. You have these wistful fantasies of security and constancy that come up with paintings of suburban gardens just before the Second World War. So, you get a lot of paintings of what look like very banal gardens, but they are really crystallizing these desires to stay at home and for home to be a safe place.

I think artists have always used gardens to express quite contradictory things. They’re tame, they’re wild, they’re places of exciting contact with the other, or they’re super domestic and under tight control.

SGUAnd then there are artists who not only depict gardens but also use them as a material or even see them as agents of cocreation in their artistic processes. Derek Jarman is one example that comes to mind, Meg Webster is another. Do you think this approach is becoming more common?

OLYeah, I think it is. I think the garden is very exciting as an artistic material because it answers back and is responsive. You’re not in total control. I really like the artist Anya Gallaccio, who works with natural forms, brings them into the gallery, and then allows them to rot and decay. You might get a gallery full of roses or apples that start out absolutely beautiful and pristine, and people come in and say, “Oh, how gorgeous.” Then they begin to rot, stink, and leak across the gallery floor.

I think the reason she’s excited by that as a material is because it’s not under her control. She can play with it and interact with it, but she’s not the dominant force, she’s a collaborator. As we move toward thinking in much more networked ways, the garden as a material becomes more and more exciting.

SGUThis makes me think of that moment in The Garden Against Time when you describe arriving at your Suffolk garden in August and feeling disappointed because it wasn’t as you remembered it, then realizing it was simply the worst month.

OLThis was five years ago yesterday, so we’re almost talking on the anniversary—wow, I hadn’t realized that. Actually, I was very smug this morning in the garden with Ian [their husband], saying, you know, I think I really cracked August, the garden is looking really good right now. The answer, by the way, was dahlias.

SGUAt what point in your journey as a gardener did you come to terms with the beauty in decay?

OLThat was a real, genuine revelation that happened during the process of writing the book. It slowly began to dawn on me that I was making myself feel very bad if there were things dying in the borders, even though the more ecological stuff I was reading emphasized how important that is.

Basically, soil is a living organism that needs to be covered in a skin of decaying matter, which is what feeds the soil to grow the plants. As that dawned on me, I started thinking, “Why am I out here with my dustpan and brush, tidying it like it’s a house?”

I think it’s been a real process, and I don’t want to say it’s easy to change that visual understanding of what looks beautiful, because it has been difficult to allow myself to go, “Okay, this doesn’t look great.” People might come around and think, “Oh, you’ve really neglected it.” But I know it’s not neglected, it’s just a different vision of beauty.

SGUAnd do you think our obsession with beauty has something to do with the fact that so many artists tend to immortalize gardens at their peak?

OLYes, I think there’s a real feedback loop. Monet and [his paintings of] Giverny are perfect examples of that. And I think that’s one of the reasons why Derek Jarman was so influential, he was more attuned to and interested in the full cycle of a plant’s life and leaving plant skeletons in the borders. I think we’ve undergone an education.

Piet Oudolf, the Dutch designer who did the High Line and many other gardens, is really the person who changed this. He pioneered that process of allowing plants to die back in the border. I think that’s when we began collectively to see that this black, brown, and gray palette is actually beautiful, that the winter garden is a beautiful thing in its own right.

SGUSpeaking of Derek Jarman, in your book Funny Weather you have an essay dedicated to him where you ask if gardening is an art form. You hinted at an answer there, but I’m wondering if, after writing The Garden Against Time, you have a different answer?

OLI really think it is an art form. And, you know, I’m a writer. I work every day creating complex forms and shaping them, and nothing I’ve done is as complicated as working with a garden. Because, like we were saying at the beginning, you’re in collaboration.

I suppose the closest comparison is being a choreographer. You might have this beautiful idea, and the dancers say, “Well, my body doesn’t do that.” Or, “I’m going to stand here.” You’re trying to direct, but there’s an intelligence pushing back against you.

SGUAnd in your writing process, do you ever feel there’s something pushing back against you as well? Have you come to recognize anything else that might be at play because you’ve already had that experience with the garden?

OLYeah, I think it’s changed how I approach writing and the gathering of ideas, or creativity in general, because I’m probably more attentive to random happenstance.

All writers know that sometimes you find something in an archive you weren’t looking for, and suddenly everything falls into place. A lot of it is being attentive and flexible enough to move when you find those things. Gardening also requires a lot of patience, which is probably a helpful skill for a writer. I’m not naturally patient, but the idea that you plant your seeds, your ideas, and then keep working and tweaking away has been useful.

It’s shifted my process from sitting down, starting with the first sentence, and writing straight to the end, to being much more fluid in how I construct a book.

SGUYes, I’ve always said that I come up with an idea as a writer and then look away to let it compost. When I return to it, I’m often surprised by what I see.

I also want us to discuss gardens as settings to show art, sculpture gardens like Niki de Saint Phalle’s Tarot Garden in Tuscany and the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas. In those settings, are plants simply a backdrop, or are they necessary parts of the artworks?

OLI think the most exciting ones for me are those where the plants are participants. The ones I find most boring are where everything is neatly mown, and some sculptures have simply been dropped in, maybe lined up with a few views, but they could just as easily be in a gallery.

I’m thinking back to some of the examples we included in A Garden Manifesto, like Gerry’s Pompeii. This was an amazing working-class Irishman living in a council house who made his own sculpture garden in his backyard, casting concrete figures. They’re completely wild, beguiling, and strange. But so much of it is also about the setting. It could only be seen from the canal. The whole environment is pulled into this theatrical possibility. People catch sight of it behind bushes, just a glimpse, and it’s thrilling.

SGUWhat about gardens that don’t necessarily contain art in the traditional sense, but—like we were discussing—view gardening as an art form? How do you view those instances as curatorial practices?

OLThe one that I think is unquestionably among the great works of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is Great Dixter. The original designer, Christopher Lloyd, was a real visionary, as is the current head gardener, Fergus Garrett, both in his understanding of ecology and his aesthetic sensibility. The garden changes every year. You might go back hoping to see that crazy display of pink and red snapdragons you loved, but it’s gone, it was that year, that moment, and now there’s something else.

It feels like a space full of experiments with color, form, and ecology. The scale of ambition, its role as a teaching garden, and the intellectual engagement all really match the greatest museums.

SGUI want to go back to our earlier conversation about gardens as places for political change or activism, something art has always been as well. Despite the importance of that political role in both worlds, do you think they should or can still also serve a purely aesthetic purpose, beauty for beauty’s sake?

OLI actually think there is a way to do both. One of the revelations that came toward the end of writing The Garden Against Time was the question of whether the garden is just a selfish space? Is it just a desire to make an aesthetic space that walls off other beings?

And I think some of the experiments I’m describing at Great Dixter really explore making a space of maximum diversity that is also a space of maximum human intervention. It’s not about just leaving it to rewild or that rather austere ecological approach of removing the human influence altogether. It’s very much about recognizing that we do have a role to play here, and one of the things that can have surprisingly positive ecological effects is our desire for beauty, joy, and abundance.

Honestly, I feel like we all need to hear that right now, that our desires for beauty and gorgeousness aren’t just selfish, toxic, or destructive to the environment we live in, but might be a way to help that environment, to participate, create habitat and abundance and feel at home in it in a less harmful way. So, this type of gardening that is at once creative and attentive to the needs of the network, to the biodiversity of the place, is incredibly exciting to me.

SGUDo you think beauty for beauty’s sake in the art world can also produce those same effects?

OLDo you remember that great moment in the pandemic where it seemed like nobody in the art world was going to fly again?

SGUOf course.

OLLike a wonderful little window where it suddenly seemed like people really understood the climate crisis and their own culpability. And then flying resumed and everybody forgot about it.

I think it’s harder with the art world, partly because there’s so much more money involved. That makes it more complicated, and it’s implicated in extractive capitalism in ways gardening usually isn’t so directly. But the art world is also a space of aspirations, utopian dreams, and possibilities. It’s not just about making beautiful things that hang on the walls of the super-rich; it exists for all of us as well. I think both are deeply complex spaces.

SGUI think that answers a question I wanted to ask you about what the art world has to learn from the gardening world, but what could gardeners learn from the art world, if anything at all?

OLThere’s an interesting point about hierarchy. In the art world, the artist is usually the star around whom things revolve. But in gardening, it’s often the designer who holds that position. Meanwhile, the actual gardener, the day-to-day person caring for those spaces, whether public or private, is usually very low on the pecking order.

I think that’s something people have only really started challenging in the last few years because it’s a contentious issue. But the idea that the person doing the daily work deserves much more attention and appreciation is something that could definitely change.