I’m deep into reading and absorbing Olivia Laing’s fascinating new book, “The Garden Against Time.”

In just a few pages, she has already made me think about what my flowers and my garden beds mean to me and how they may help lead me and others into an uncertain future as we continue to devastate our home and our planet.

I have already noticed that time is different when dealing with flowers and gardens, but Laing’s ideas have much more significance than that.  The Pandemic and drought seemingly destroyed Laing’s famous and private new garden, which she mourned, but she found ways to bring it back to life when it started to rain again. She also discovered that many plants and flowers never really died; they just waited for the right time to return to life.

But Laing says their ability to rise again and hibernate has enormous consequences for the world and the future role of gardens, plants, and food.

My flowers and garden could be a refuge and model for the future, a new understanding of time. I wonder if I sensed that or if the idea lurked in my subconscious. I would like to know where I fit into all of this. I came to love flowers; perhaps there is still time for me to love gardens. Maria does.

From Laing’s new book:

“There was something else, too. I was exhausted by the perpetual, agonized now of the news. I didn’t just want to journey backward through the centuries. I wanted to move into a different understanding of time: the kind of time that moves in spirals or cycles, pulsing between rot and fertility, light and darkness. I had an inkling even then that the gardener is initiated into a different understanding of time, which might also have a bearing on how to preclude the apocalypse we have seem bent on careening into. I wanted to dig down and see what I could find. A garden contains secrets, we all know that, buried elements that might put strange growth or germinate in unexpected places. The garden that I chose had walls,  but like every garden, it was interconnected, wide open to the world.”