Virtual Talk: The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise
Thu, Jun 27, 2024
2:00 PM- 3:00 PM
In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore a walled garden in Suffolk, England. The work drew her into an exhilarating investigation of paradise and its long association with gardens. 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, Laing interrogates the sometimes shocking cost of making paradise on earth.
But the story of the garden doesn’t always enact larger patterns of privilege and exclusion. It’s also a place of rebel outposts and communal dreams. From the improbable queer utopia conjured by Derek Jarman on the beach at Dungeness to the fertile vision of a common Eden propagated by William Morris, new modes of living can, and have, been attempted amidst the flower beds—experiments that could prove vital in the coming era of climate change.
The result is a humming, glowing tapestry, a beautiful and exacting account of the abundant pleasures and possibilities of gardens; not as a place to hide from the world but as a site of encounter and discovery, bee-loud, and pollen-laden.
This webinar will be convened by Open Days Co-founder Page Dickey.
DATE AND TIME
Thursday, June 27, 2024
2:00 p.m. Eastern
LOCATION
Live on Zoom
REGISTRATION
Registration for this event has ended.
A recording of this webinar will be sent to all registrants a few days after the event. We encourage you to register, even if you cannot attend the live webinar.
Members of the Frank & Anne Cabot Society for planned giving have complimentary access to Garden Conservancy webinars. All Cabot Society members will automatically be sent the link to participate on the morning of the webinar. For more information about the Cabot Society, please contact Bridget Connors at bconnors@gardenconservancy.org or 845.424.6500, ext. 228.
About the Speakers: 
Olivia Laing is an internationally acclaimed writer and critic. She’s the author of seven books, including The Lonely City, Crudo, Funny Weather, and Everybody. She’s a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and in 2018 was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for non fiction. Her work has been translated into 21 languages. Her latest book, The Garden Against Time, recounts the restoration of her walled garden in Suffolk, England.
Page Dickey has been gardening passionately 
since her early twenties. She has been writing about gardening,as well as designing gardens for others, for the last three decades. She has written eight books and edited another. Her new book, Uprooted: A Gardener Reflects on Beginning Again, describes leaving a beloved garden of 34 years, finding a home in the northwest corner of Connecticut, and falling in love with its land.