Gardens have been a lifelong comfort for Olivia Laing. In these uncertain times, she welcomes their green embrace more than ever
Gardens have been the anchor and mainstay of my life, the most enduring source of fascination and pleasure. I started young. My father is a besotted plantsman and after my parents divorced in the early 1980s he spent custody weekends taking me and my younger sister to every open garden within 50 miles of the M25. We whiled away wet Saturdays in the hothouses at Kew, trying to persuade the butterflies to land on our fingers. I learned my first botanical name at RHS Wisley one winter afternoon, lured by the rich fragrance emitting from a nondescript shrub with tiny clusters of shell-pink flowers – Daphne odora ‘Warblington’, a name that has lodged with me ever since.
I was an anxious and not very happy child, and I loved the spell of self-forgetfulness that happens in a garden – the sense of being wholly absorbed, lifted out of time. The places I was most drawn to were shaggy, a little wild around the edges. I agreed with Frances Hodgson Burnett’s manifesto in The Secret Garden: a garden loses all its magic if it becomes too spick and span. It must feel half-forgotten, sunk in slumber. You have to be able to lose yourself, to forget the outside world; to feel, as Burnett put it, hundreds of miles from anyone, but not lonely at all.
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