YouSaid · the spoken record

Olivia Laing

lines on the record: 33
first: 2024-05-22
most recent: 2024-05-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“The privilege is very useful to think about, but sometimes it's a bit of a blunt instrument. It's actually more subtle than that. There are ways we can participate that are going to help the planet that we love and that we depend upon”
2024-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Garden as a Personal Paradise, with Olivia Laing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To our planet. And the Dixter experiment opens up this alternative vision, which is that humans acting for aesthetic pleasure, for joy are also doing something that is beneficial. You have to garden in a way that's loose, that doesn't use pesticides, that allows things to rot and die back to create habitat. But here's this way of gardening. And it doesn't require a vaster stage. What it requires is a patchwork, it's a patchwork of public and private. It's a patchwork that can involve the greening of cities. And gardens are the future for cities, botanic gardens, lower temperatures in heat waves more than trees. There's this sense that the garden is actually a solution to the problems that we've created. And the garden is a place where we are creative. Our creativity is part of the solution. And I think for me, an enormous burden dropped from my shoulders when I realised that.”
2024-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Garden as a Personal Paradise, with Olivia Laing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“and they'd commissioned a biodiversity audit and the really interesting revelation of that was that unlike the sort of ideas from rewilding where you'd think the most wild places were the richest their six acre site has woodland it has ponds it has untouched meadows once a year but it also has an ornamental garden and that was the place of the greatest biodiversity this sort of extraordinary prolific gorgeous garden And I think for me from a decade, you know, back in the 90s, involved in climate activism, it sometimes seemed as if the best thing humans could do was just not engage at all, just stop, vanish, leave the planet and everything would be fine. You cannot live with that, you know. I think I had a breakdown in my field after being involved in activism because of that, because of that sense that our existence is entirely detrimental.”
2024-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Garden as a Personal Paradise, with Olivia Laing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I don't think it's just that. I think there is absolutely that. But I think also towards the end of the book, I have this agonized experience when there's a drought and I suddenly all my life I thought that gardening was the most ethical thing, being involved in plants was the most ethical thing. And suddenly this viscera opens up that perhaps I am the selfish gardener that I've been excoriating from the past, turning on the taps when I know it's draining from the rivers, bringing in compost in a plastic sack that I know is having detrimental effects elsewhere. And that's painful to confirm.”
2024-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Garden as a Personal Paradise, with Olivia Laing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it was the pandemic. I hadn't really seen people for a long time. It was an amazing day. I don't know if I'll feel like that if I do it again, but that particular day. But also I think it was that I'd worked alone for so long, making this thing. And then a lot of the people who came in had known the garden in its previous life. So that sense of being connected up to the past was very exciting”
2024-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Garden as a Personal Paradise, with Olivia Laing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Works with what's there. He really, but also he's bringing an exotic things. It's not like he's got some sort of very strict ecological line. He's playing and the Guardian gets more and more luxuriant and beautiful as Jummer gets sicker and sicker. And at this point, it's outlived him by decades. Extraordinarily, they're the Guardian still is. And I think it just stuck in my head is this place of possibility. You know, there are gardens in the book that I think are real positive places, they're sanctuaries. Their walls are used as a marker of safety. And I think they're interesting and important. But what Jarmin's doing in terms of openness is... Just thrilling anyone could come and walk by and poke around chances are he'd bring them in for a cup of tea. That's a way of gardening that I think is very beautiful.”
2024-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Garden as a Personal Paradise, with Olivia Laing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Running to Mason Burteau to sow some mischief. So it switches voices all the time. So as a model for writing, I think it was very exciting to me that it just had so much flux and fluidity in it. And then how he approaches the garden is also sort of mischievous and anarchic. It's impossible to grow a garden there. It's a shingle beach. It's subject to very, very powerful winds. So nobody would make a garden. But he just sort of starts playing around, he digs some holes and puts manure in and plants some roses. And there's already gorse. There's already sea kale.”
2024-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Garden as a Personal Paradise, with Olivia Laing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. So, gentlemen, again, is somebody I came across in the 1990s, my sister was a huge fan of him, so I saw his films. But the thing that really gripped me at the beginning was Modern Nature, which is his memoir of Making the Garden at Prospect after he was diagnosed with AIDS. So it's a book about death and life intensely entwined in really visceral proximity You have this very pretty in quality about German. He's amazingly sort of scholarly and the prospero magician. And then he's very naughty and mischievous and full of gossip and like a magpie kind of darting around.”
2024-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Garden as a Personal Paradise, with Olivia Laing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think that is the thing that the Gardener kind of lives for to be sort of fingertip in proximity to that absolute magic of you are seeing miraculous things happen. I mean, you're seeing death, but also it's a constant, the garden is a constant victory against death. Here it comes again. Here it all rises up. We're in this peak moment in May of the green wave breaking.”
2024-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Garden as a Personal Paradise, with Olivia Laing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That sense of kind of what's it's like a shopping list, it's like a Christmas list, but also there's a mournful quality to them. There's an amazing thing in a book by Jenny Hugler about Tradiscant making lists of the plants in his garden and some of them have a little X because they've died. But even more sadly, some of them have an X and then a question.”
2024-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Garden as a Personal Paradise, with Olivia Laing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I made constant this. Yeah, I'm a realist maker. And really, a lot of not just this book, but my entire life is shaped by Derek Jarmin's modern nature and his lists. Which of themselves drawn from Gerard's list or from medieval herbal lists? So that sense of the lists kind of enticing power to future generations, I think that's really true, that a list is very beguiling and full of mystery. What is this problem? Why have they written it down? Shall I grow it and find out?”
2024-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Garden as a Personal Paradise, with Olivia Laing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I know that's one of the many sort of Rennicks taken from somewhere else. And I think this is the gorgeous pastel of gardening is that gardeners want to pass things on. I just went to Dan Pearson's garden a couple of days ago and he gave me some sweet pea seeds which he'd been given by Tony Venison, who was a friend of my room rehowned this garden. But they actually came from Cedric Morris, who's one of the characters in the book who lived at Benton End. So there's this sense of Everyone contributing to this legacy of wanting to make sure things survive, so needing to hand them on to somebody else. So plants are migrants. Plants are constantly moving around new places.”
2024-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Garden as a Personal Paradise, with Olivia Laing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because that's fine. That's fine. That's having a great year. I mean, we've had a lot of rain, so actually, the gardener is looking amazing at the moment.”
2024-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Garden as a Personal Paradise, with Olivia Laing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He feels himself in a reciprocal relation. And when that landscape is destroyed, He has this kind of breakdown that he doesn't recover from. He ends up being what we'd now call sectioned and he spends the rest of his life in a mental institution where he's really taken care of, but he's no longer in the place that has meaning for him. And so the meaning falls from his life. It's a tragic story. I felt such deep affection for Claire, but also there he is this persistent witness. When he gardened, he caught up remnants of the vulnerable landscape, the landscape about to be destroyed, and he placed them in his garden and he does exactly the same thing with his poems and letters. He gives us what it was like. And there we have it, this sense of a kind of wholeness, a kind of ecological wholeness that”
2024-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Garden as a Personal Paradise, with Olivia Laing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Enclosures before him like a crisis. He is watching the loved landscape of Heppenstall be torn up. He's watching beloved places destroyed very much in the way that I watched when I was involved in road protests, that the specific place of somewhere like Fairmail being destroyed for the A30 feels like a very Jean Clare experience. And rather than the sort of lordly aristocrat who stands in his park and looks down upon his landscape, what John Clare is doing is he's lying belly to the ground. He's part and parcel of the landscape. He's watching things like a villager watching the goings-on of his neighbours. He's really interested in the sense of belonging. And he has this great famous bit of writing where he gets lost. And he says he goes out of his knowledge. Just the sense of I don't know where I am, it's where I am doesn't know me”
2024-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Garden as a Personal Paradise, with Olivia Laing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think he's an incredible figure. He is. The first witness, or not the first witness, but one of the really early witnesses to what we could call ecocide. He declares a kind of climate grief. He expresses feelings that I think are very familiar to us now. And what they're about is the rending of a continuum. So he is a peasant poet. He's from the bottom rung of the agricultural labourers. He's extremely poor, but somehow he manages to educate himself, to become a poet, and then to become a published poet. He sold more copies than Keats in his lifetime. He really was well known.”
2024-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Garden as a Personal Paradise, with Olivia Laing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On both what's done and what it feels like to have it done. So there is this so often when these things happen, there's no witness because nobody has written language. But John Claire did.”
2024-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Garden as a Personal Paradise, with Olivia Laing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sea change so that it looked like a landscape painting. And I think that idea that we look at it and think, oh, that is the correct landscape, but actually it's an illusion produced to look like what we think a correct landscape is fascinating, but also it needs to be understood. And I don't think that drains the pleasure from it. But for me, when I look at those landscapes, they're very much landscapes of power. They have that history. And it doesn't mean I wouldn't go to Stow and go, wow, it looks incredible, or perhaps I'll take a photo. But it's learning to be interested in other kinds of landscapes and learning to see what was done to produce it. Who lost out? Who labored on it and whose labour paid for it? And I think this is where, in terms of enclosures, I was so lucky with John Clare because there he is. He's watching. He's recording. He's writing down.”
2024-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Garden as a Personal Paradise, with Olivia Laing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. And I think it's being able to hold both things in your mind. And I do think this is part of why the National Trust publication caused so much outrage is that people felt they were being told that they couldn't love it anymore. But I think both is possible. There's no question that what Capability Brown and his troops performed on the English countryside was a fabulously beautiful sleight of hand. But what I think is dangerous about it is that it looks as if it's permanent. The illusion is it was always thus. These people always owned this land. This land always had this settled charm of park and oak and lake. But in fact, that conceals an enormous violence that was done upon the land. That is the common land that belonged to the common people. And it was very literally taken from them. The landscape itself was rearranged to perform this”
2024-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Garden as a Personal Paradise, with Olivia Laing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The garden tells us something different. It tells us that we have to let things die back, and then they reemerge. We have to accept and submit to that cycle. And so much of those dangerous dreams of the 18th century are to do with being able to create an illusion of permanent perfection, strawberries at Christmas, the entire suite of so-called pleasures that actually come with enormous displaced pain for others that are kept very carefully out of view. And I think part of the operation of this book is trying to bring those things into view and then say, is this the paradise you really want? I don't think it is. Here are better paradises. So time is crucial in the work.”
2024-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Garden as a Personal Paradise, with Olivia Laing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely, and accept the garden's clock. The strange thing about Eden, the dangerous dream of Eden, I think, is that it is in a state of permanent abundance. It is fruit and flowers at the same time. It's impossible. And this is the dream of capitalism. I think what I'm starting to think about the garden is that it is the anti-capitalist clock. It isn't permanent growth. Permanent growth is what's led us into this state of apocalyptic degradation.”
2024-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Garden as a Personal Paradise, with Olivia Laing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're surrounding ourselves with dystopias we think the future is completely mapped out but actually that sense of freedom and space to move in, that's where the room to dream of utopia comes from.”
2024-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Garden as a Personal Paradise, with Olivia Laing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“and that he composes this poem that's so deeply engaged with the question of failure and then what you do next. We don't think about that enough, I don't think. We don't like to think from that place. But here's this enormous and complex vision of what could happen next. And I think the reason the final line is so moving, the world was all before them, is that it reminds you, it underscores that the future is unwritten. That is the nature of the future.”
2024-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Garden as a Personal Paradise, with Olivia Laing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You want Yeah, I found a poem so interesting. Unlike you, I came to it very late. And it was very interesting to read it in that moment, which I've written about extensively in funny way the Krudo and everybody, of the sense of the failure of the liberal dream, the sense of the failure of all of the freedom movements of the 20th century being rolled back and repealed, to come to Paradise Lost with that sort of mood, that sort of experience, and to realize that it's a poem that is also grappling with the failure of dreams. It's Milton writing it at the moment that he realises he's actually lost his side, have lost that the Republican dream is over, that he's writing in terror, literal terror of his own death,”
2024-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Garden as a Personal Paradise, with Olivia Laing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, that was amazing to suddenly realize. And it's funny, I didn't start writing that book with this sense of, oh, my mother was outed. We had to run away from home. So we ended up being expelled from this beautiful walled garden that I'd been very happy in. But the penny suddenly dropped. But I think that's true of lots of people, perhaps not quite so literally, but that people have a sense of a lost Eden, a sense of a lost paradise. Yes.”
2024-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Garden as a Personal Paradise, with Olivia Laing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fault line that the garden sits on, which makes it so interesting to think about intellectually, philosophically and politically.”
2024-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Garden as a Personal Paradise, with Olivia Laing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so this was really fascinating as a good Catholic girl. I'd assumed that Paradise meant heaven and that all of our associations, all of our earthly associations, were sort of tacked on afterwards slightly heretically that we were talking about paradise and earth. But that isn't true at all. The word emerges in Avastan, basically a Persian language. It's ancient and what it refers to is a walled garden. It literally means walled garden. And that by association works its way into the Bible and becomes the word for Eden and then by association again the word for heaven. So the whole thing comes back to the terrestrial. It comes back to the earthly dream of a green, fertile, beautiful place that isn't exactly natural, but isn't a city either. It's a made place that's in negotiation with the wild. And that's”
2024-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Garden as a Personal Paradise, with Olivia Laing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“and at the same time it also underscored like you say the promise of the garden the sense that the garden was a place people desired to be that it still had retained its power i think that really fascinated me and then the third thing that came out of the pandemic especially the late pandemic was black lives matter was the national trust survey about slavery and colonialism the massive backlash that happened to that from the right and the sense again that we're looking at this ongoing pattern that comes for enclosure but we're also looking at this ongoing pattern that happens from colonialism and colonial slavery so the beautification of the landscape who pays for that who benefits from that so i think i probably would have looked at those things anyway but the pandemic just turbocharged the investigation in in three really distinct ways”
2024-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Garden as a Personal Paradise, with Olivia Laing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Underscored this entire thread in the book, which is basically about the enclosures, the seizure of the common land by a minority of wealthy people that has been happening, well, you can date it back to the 16th century, but particularly 17th and 18th century, this process that leads up to the present day where an enormous proportion of our country is owned by very few people. So I think that really clarified something that I've been thinking about since the 90s.”
2024-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Garden as a Personal Paradise, with Olivia Laing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think it was actually more extreme than that because I think it divided very rapidly into two halves. So there was a moment at the beginning where it seemed like, oh, everyone's falling in love with gardening. This is fantastic. You know, the Instagram feed filling up with pictures of people's sweet peas. And that was lovely. But I think very rapidly, and it was a huge amount of people who started gardening for the first time, something like three million millennials started gardening in the UK. And the statistics are mapped in Russia, in America, in India, in Italy. So it was a global phenomenon. But at the same time, it very quickly became clear that there was enormous inequality in that, that some people spent the pandemic sitting in their deck chairs and some people spent the pandemic in a mildewed bedsit with housing insecurity and went out to parks that were pantaloged and then got police orders because they were trying to get into wild spaces that were close to them. So I think that really...”
2024-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Garden as a Personal Paradise, with Olivia Laing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That it would be a book situated in a garden. It didn't necessarily have to be the garden I ended up in, it could have been any garden, I think. But that I wanted to use that place to trace out almost step by step much larger stories about gardens, about paradise and about the desire for freedom, but also the cost of Eden.”
2024-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Garden as a Personal Paradise, with Olivia Laing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then after that, I trained to be a herbalist, but I was still living outdoors for a long time. I was living on an abandoned pig farm that we were trying to turn into a community garden. This is in the mid-90s. So plants were everywhere in my life and it was very clear at that point that plants signified something radical, that they signified utopian possibilities rung out of the teeth of climate change. And I think then they sort of went into abeyance in my life. It's funny, you can see them into the river. It's a book full of flowers. And then they kind of vanish from my work for a long time. But I knew. Even as I was finishing, certainly everybody, probably funny weather as well, that I had this next book project that I wanted to explore Utopia. I wanted to think about alternatives.”
2024-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Garden as a Personal Paradise, with Olivia Laing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Stately home gard My parents had divorced Was the way that my father Spent his time with us Gardens always represented a kind of security security and misery. They always had this sort of ambivalence As I got older, I got more involved in environmental activism and I dropped out of university and I spent my early 20s, first of all, living on road protests, so living in tree houses in threatened woods that were in the line of road building projects.”
2024-05-22 · Intelligence Squared · The Garden as a Personal Paradise, with Olivia Laing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT