The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise

Are gardens tangled up with ideas of privilege and exclusion?

From Eden on, the answer is definitely yes. The very word ‘paradise’ comes from the Persian for ‘walled garden’, and a walled garden by its nature is both a place of seclusion and safety, but also expulsion and privilege. The Eden of the Bible and Milton’s Paradise Lost is a place of great beauty, but also of surveillance and eviction. What I wanted to do with this book was examine the ways that gardens have been involved in these process. Who paid for them? How? Who was included and who was left out? I look at the process of enclosure, the seizure of the common land in England by the wealthy, and I also examine how the obscene profits from colonial slavery funded a concerted beautification of the landscape. The family I track through the centuries and across continents, the Middletons, used gardens as a way of purifying their money, ascending up the class ladder until they were on close terms with the royal family. They used gardens to wash their reputations and to erase slavery from view. It’s very similar to how the Sackler family used art to distance themselves from the horrors of the opioid epidemic, from which their wealth arose. I wanted to show in a very granular way how those processes worked, but I also wanted to remain alive to the radical possibilities of gardens.