The reader of “Paradise Lost” encounters the Garden of Eden at the same time that Satan does. Having leapt over the garden wall, Milton’s athletic antihero flies up into a tree to survey his new surroundings. “Beneath him with new wonder now he views,” Milton writes,
To all delight of human sense expos’d
In narrow room Nature’s whole wealth, yea more,
A Heav’n on Earth, for blissful Paradise
Of God the Garden was, by him in the East
Of Eden planted.
Milton’s Paradise is an enclosed space, a “narrow room,” designed—albeit imperfectly—to keep trespassers out. In this, it’s much like most gardens, which, as Olivia Laing writes in “The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise,” have historically been exclusive affairs. Laing, who goes by both “she” and “they,” loves gardens, but she doesn’t love that they are often private property, accessible only to those who can afford them, sometimes at the expense of the lives and livelihoods of those who can’t. She longs for an all-inclusive paradise—at least, part of her does. Buried, not so deep, in this book’s topsoil is a tension between Laing’s progressive political commitments and aesthetic preferences that she worries are tied to élitism, inequality, and injustice. Is the private garden, she asks, a “tarnished, even contaminated zone, a source of unquestioned privilege, the gleaming fruit of dirty money”? Or can it be “a place of possibility, where new modes of living and models of power can and have been attempted”?
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