Welcome to Litsy!

Nonbinary British writer Olivia Laing‘s experience of renovating a garden in Suffolk is entwined with an exploration of the role of gardens in history & in particular their connection with sociopolitical issues. The role of gardens in the lives of queer folk during a time when it wasn‘t good to be gay, the therapeutic effect of gardens to this day, the lush botanical language: there‘s so much that I love about this book! #LGBTQ

Sameness was anathema to William Morris. What he liked was individuality amidst common purpose, each person as distinctive as flowers in a meadow.

The study of botany was an exercise in looking. It made the ordinary world more intricate and finely detailed, as if I had acquired a magnifying glass that trebled the eye‘s capacity.

There‘s no point looking for Eden on a map. It‘s a dream that is carried in the heart: a fertile garden, time and space enough for all of us.

Morris thought everyone‘s environment could be & should be more beautiful. He believed it was people‘s right to live in beautiful, unspoilt, unpolluted places & he thought, like Ruskin, that beauty was not a luxury & that luxurious & unnecessary things were actually unbeautiful, since beauty was so closely aligned to necessity & nature.

What makes a garden such an important constituent of a utopia? It is neither a farm nor a wilderness, though it can push up hard against either of these extremes. This means it betokens more than just utility, encompassing beauty, pleasure & delight, while remaining emphatically a site of labour as well as leisure, a place to please puritans & sybarites alike.

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But Eden also served as a justification, a God-given excuse note for the brutal work. In the seventeenth century, arguments for colonial expansion regularly drew on Genesis, and God's injunction to man to subdue and have dominion over all creation; an attitude, I might add, that is directly responsible for the perilous state of our planet now.

Picked this as I've stayed in that area numerous times, visiting my good friends.
Whilst the idea of this was great, I couldn't gel with this book and skimmed it...

On paper, I should have loved this. I listened to the audiobook which I found uninspiring and flat. The tone made it difficult to engage with, even though I was interested in the topic: Laing is restoring a garden in Suffolk which she uses as a point to explore the ways humans have created “paradises” over the years. Gardens exist for the wealthy through slave labor. What‘s the impact of this? This gets lots of praise, so I should have gone print.

I enjoyed this story about a friendship between a teenage boy at the start of ww1 and the great artist Charles Rennie Mackintosh who, together with his wife, had moved to the Suffolk Town of Southwold. Using this nugget of truth, the author creates an imagined tale that expands to describe Tom, his family, and the inhabitants of the town. The book had me searching about Mackintosh + his artist wife Margaret as well as his subsequent arrest.