On a Sunday afternoon in May, Elizabeth Street Garden, a quiet public park between Manhattan's SoHo and Little Italy neighborhoods, was packed with people despite gray skies and a light rain. Visitors sat at tables surrounded by fuchsia azaleas and yellow irises or in the shade of old branching trees, talking, eating pizza and sipping iced coffee. Artists were working at easels at the back of the garden, painting watercolors.
Like most public green spaces in New York City, it's surprising that Elizabeth Street Garden exists at all. It thrives on a piece of once-abandoned land that was leased to the late gallery owner Alan Leiber in 1990. Leiber cleared the site of debris, cultivated many of the plants that remain, and installed mythical stone statues (a few lions, a sphinx, and an angel for a touch of fantasy). During the financial crisis of the '70s, residents began repurposing the abandoned land and turning it into community gardens for quiet meditation, gathering, and growing food. Today, many of these gardens are protected by land trusts. Elizabeth Street Garden can't claim such immunity. After a 12-year legal battle between the city and the garden's advocates, the garden is finally due to be evicted this September. The land is set to be sold to a conglomerate of three developers who plan to build high-end retail and affordable housing for seniors.
In her new book, Gardens Against Time: In Search of a Common Eden, British author Olivia Raine presents gardens as expressions of utopian ideals, including the belief that people's lives would be enriched if they had free land to use – a belief that is at the heart of the fight to protect Elizabeth Street Garden. She examines some of Britain's most beloved gardens and landscapes, from ornate Shrubland Hall in Suffolk to artist Derek Jarman's modest seaside home, Prospect Cottage in Kent, to see how each supported an aspect of utopianism – or failed altogether.
Gardens in a race against time: in search of a common paradise
Olivia Laing
Gardens have long nurtured the idealistic yearnings of writers, artists, and philosophers. The Christian creation myth, for example, evokes the Garden of Eden, a lush paradise where food was plentiful and pleasures overflowed. Utopianists see their projects, at least in part, as a return to such a way of life, one in which all were fulfilled. It’s a goal that’s likely impossible to achieve, but gardens have a more practical, even urgent, use in our time. As the dramatic effects of climate change disrupt agriculture-based economies around the world and dismantle complex food distribution systems, gardens, especially communally tended gardens, may gain greater importance in our communities. And as cities and neighborhoods become denser and more developed, places like Elizabeth Street Gardens will provide more needed open space.
In the summer of 2020, at a time when the importance of accessible green spaces was becoming clear during the COVID-19 pandemic, Ms. Raine and her husband, the poet Ian Paterson, moved to an 18th-century house in Suffolk, about a two-hour drive northeast of London. At the back of the house was an overgrown, long-neglected garden enclosed by a high brick wall. While others might have seen the gritty, insect-free soil and rotting fruit trees and assumed it was merely a ruin, Ms. Raine saw something else: visions of a fragrant garden bursting with flowers, boxwood hedges and leafy trees, brimming with new life. Ms. Raine's fascination with her garden is apparent in her supple prose. “A flock of lady's mantles foamed at the flags, and on the far border a single cardoon spread its sails full, its purple crown burning in the unsteady light.” She gets to work, uprooting dead plants, cutting back overgrown ones, enriching flower beds with fertilizer, and planting new plants — peonies, foxgloves, hyssop, and cosmos — keeping diary-like records of her progress.
These scenes give Laing a chance to explain how working toward a “common paradise” begins with individual acts of trying to improve the environment around us. Instead, she displays her ability to correctly identify plants (admittedly impressive) and describes the garden's satisfying transformation from an unmanageable catastrophe to a sculpted idyll. These passages and Laing's delicate bouquet of words are certainly reasons enough to read The Garden Against Time. But for those interested in concrete ideas about how investments in green space can bring about a better, more equitable future, there is little here. I had hoped that Laing would explain how the work she has done in her garden – time-consuming, often frustrating and stigmatizing work – offers a rich metaphor for activism. Instead, she focuses primarily on how her garden offers a space for meditation, seclusion, and respite from the dire news cycle.
Inexplicably, Raine fails to meaningfully acknowledge the contradiction of enjoying her own private garden while arguing that we would all benefit from greater public access to more land. This argument is built by her exploration of Britain's troubling history of property theft. She recalls the tragic story of the English poet John Clare, born in the late 18th century to a family of agricultural labourers in the village of Helpston. His popular first collection of poems, Poems Depicting Country Life and Scenery, expounded on the virtues of tilling the land and praised the beauty of the open fields and woods around him. The land was requisitioned by Parliament, a form of land theft that was later ratified in legislation such as the General Enclosure Act of 1845, which facilitated the privatization of vast areas that had previously been collectively owned and used. Uprooted from the places that had inspired him and forced to abandon his way of life, Clare became mentally unstable. He continued to write, but his success as a poet waned and he struggled to provide for his family. In middle age, he checked himself into a psychiatric hospital and was later diagnosed with mental illness.
In another chapter, Lane shows how the economics of slavery in America strained the fortunes of an already wealthy British family. The Middletons (no relation to Princess Kate Middleton) made their fortune from slaves and plantations they owned in South Carolina. They funneled their profits into the lavish decoration of the famed Shrubland Hall and its elaborate private gardens, not far from Lane's Suffolk mansion. With its resemblance to an Italian palazzo, Shrubland Hall became one of the most extravagant homes in England and elevated the Middletons' social status, all at a horrific and inhuman cost.
Here, and throughout the book, Laing draws attention to the devastating damage that abuses of power can cause. She repeatedly points out the social and political forces that have allowed the wealthy to determine access to land and accumulate vast wealth from the immense suffering of others. It seems to be a reference to the fact that these problems continue today. This is a well-crafted argument, and of course true, but it is so uncontroversial that I did not immediately recognize it as one of the book's lively observations. At one point, Laing laments the gardens' “hidden costs, their hidden relations with power and exclusion.” In our profit-driven modern times, such costs are hardly “hidden,” and these relations are not “hidden.” On the contrary, they are perfectly clear in the many cases where land has been privatized and, as a result, no longer available to the public. For example, the investors and local government leaders who are planning the destruction of Elizabeth Street Gardens are prioritizing new development over valuable community resources.
At the end of the chapter on Shrubland Hall, Lane concludes that “there are better ways to do gardens,” but he offers no more than a few familiar ideas that are vaguely tossed about later in the book. “Massive land redistribution” and “improved access to gardens” are needed, Lane says. “Parks instead of new airports, lots over highways, massive reinvestment in public resources.” Lane doesn't elaborate; he seems to expect readers to infer a better future mainly from highlighting the terrible mistakes made by others long ago.
In Raine’s previous books, such as A Journey to Echo Spring, which examines several writers’ notoriously problematic relationships with alcohol, and The Lonely City, which deals with loneliness and creativity, she has compiled insightful and surprisingly poignant observations on various aspects of contemporary life, drawing on the lives of historical figures. But here, her historical lens weakens her overall project. With a few exceptions, her subjects are from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, when land ownership in Britain was primarily available to white men. Thus, in The Garden of Time, there are few characters outside that demographic. Raine’s argument might have felt more relevant if she had included recent efforts by activists and movements that reflect the pressing environmental issues of our time, such as land reclamation by the descendants of indigenous peoples and formerly enslaved peoples, or the redistribution of private land to increase food sovereignty for disenfranchised groups.
In the book's final pages, Lane can only watch as her garden withers in the record heat of the summer of 2021. A temporary order restricting public water use means she can't help watering her plants. That fall, as temperatures begin to drop, she is moved to see many of the plants she thought had died return. “I had to keep telling myself that plants are much more resilient than I thought they were.” I immediately thought of Elizabeth Street Garden. If it were truly destroyed, it would be a tremendous loss for New Yorkers. Those of us who were fortunate enough to experience it might be able to imagine a future where that spirit could be carried elsewhere, blooming freely for all, not hidden behind high walls or oppressed by corporate greed.
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