‘Hurry up slow down!’: The Garden as Political Metaphor with Olivia Laing and Richard Porter

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I wanted to start by asking about the process of putting A Garden Manifesto together. It’s a seamless blend of poetry, essays, climate projects and art, and it covers a lot of ground: capitalism, the health crisis, war, race, gender.

Why do you think the garden is a site to explore all of these issues? How did you find a narrative through all the separate pieces?

Richard Porter: Where did we start?

Olivia Laing: We started by inviting people. We created a Google Doc and dropped all the entries into it and Rich printed the entirety of it. We had this massive stack, and we met in my flat. It was the most brilliant editing experience, wasn’t it? It was really interesting, because this is the first co-edited one you’ve done.

Richard: Yes, it is. The anthologies that I’ve done before were always responding to a particular word or a work of art, and I would never try and direct or shape responses. The end anthology is totally instinctive, organic. And I think that was what appealed to me about doing an anthology on gardens, just in terms of how gardens are these unwieldy spaces that you can cultivate but only to an extent. Things grow in unison or have conversations between each other.

Olivia: It worked as a metaphor for what Pilot was doing anyway.

Richard: It felt like a total embodiment of what Pilot was doing with anthologies. It was a perfect idea.

Olivia: For me, it came very much out of writing The Garden Against Time, and having the sense that a lot of radical ideas are explored within the garden, but also that the garden is a safe space to think about difficult things. As I was traveling around on the book tour, I was having these very political conversations with people. I think it’s one of the things that the garden encourages.

The garden at its core is anti-homogenisation, and it’s against a capitalist model of time.

We didn’t ask people for anything specific. We didn’t direct it. The paragraph I put in the introduction is literally what we sent people: ‘What have gardens meant to you?’ So there was no control from us, or fine print saying ‘we want really political content’ or ‘we want really emotional content’. And that’s the Pilot editorial philosophy. Whatever comes in is what comes in.

Let’s talk more about Pilot Press. You said in your introduction there was no question of which publisher, it had to be Pilot. Why was that?

Olivia: Because of the larger Pilot project, and because I knew that Rich and I could do it intuitively. We could do it fast. I wouldn’t have had that with any other publisher where we could have worked in such a swift and creative way. And also because everything we’re doing on some level is motivated by the AIDS crisis. It’s so deeply part of the imperative for the book. And I know for many of the contributors too, it’s part of what gardens mean for them. For me, it was always a Pilot project. It wouldn’t exist in any other way.

Richard: A really important part of the press is creating the space, encouraging and cultivating the conditions, where vulnerable and emotional work can be shared. I think that partly comes from not trying to shape too much of what the invitation is when you initially reach out, and what you want it to be.

Olivia: We didn’t edit. Apart from obvious typos, that was part of the ethos too: we publish what we’re given. We’re not going to sculpt and shape it, in ways that I might have in a different context. I think that creates a sense of safety that means people are willing to say things that are quite raw.

Derek Jarman emerges again and again in various pieces. Was that a natural emergence, then? Why do you think he is such a central figure in the anthology?

Olivia: I’m quite deeply rooted in Derek world at this point. We both are, so he was definitely a guiding spirit through this whole project, but not a dominating spirit. In this wider circle of contributors, lots of people knew him, or they’re the next generation on and are inspired by him. The Derek light shines right through it.

There was a really beautiful image in Philip Hoare’s essay of the bright pelargoniums against the concrete of Derek’s flat, a symbol of queer resistance and vibrancy which I think the garden very much is in this book. A lot of the pieces want to break free from binary thinking as a lens to view the garden and human identity.

How can we explore gender and sexuality in the symbol of the garden? How do the two intersect?

Olivia: At a Derek Jarman event years and years ago, Philip and I were speaking about nature being queer. Nature is queer. I think that’s true. A lot of close observation of wildlife really busts those binaries. As a trans person, that sense of fluidity that you find in a garden, or the way that a garden is always in a process of change and approximation, it makes it feel like a revolutionary space. Rich was really clear from the beginning that he didn’t want any cosy garden stuff. So I guess the kind of people we invited were people who are attuned to that.

Richard: For me, it was the ancient idea of the garden. The garden as a version of paradise, a site of Utopia or Eden. My association with the garden is a space of absolute diversity and freedom. A lot of people share that connection, the garden as safe haven where often the world isn’t. That’s also why Derek is popping up.

Olivia: Because he embodied that so strongly for people.

On the one hand we have this version of the garden as safe and free, but there is also the garden as a site of resistance, as fighting against forces of oppression. One of the most striking projects mentioned in the anthology was the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library. It’s mentioned in there, this idea of the seed as a ‘subversive rebel’.

What are some of the other ways in which the garden or plants resist forces of colonialism, of oppression, particularly in times when it’s difficult to have that hope?

Olivia: The garden at its core is anti-homogenisation. On that level, it’s anti-capitalist, and it’s against a capitalist model of time. The capitalist model of time is perpetual growth and perpetual abundance, and the garden refuses that. Its model is a cycle of death and re-birth. So in the context of the capitalist imperative of perpetual abundance, which is what has directly created the climate crisis, the garden is a space to think differently, to understand time differently and to understand how to cope with abundance, followed by loss, followed by abundance, followed by loss. That’s how I think of it now. The garden as an anti-capitalist clock.

Richard: If you’ve ever tried to plough and dig away and remove in a garden, you find seeds that have been dropped and planted. If you don’t keep clearing them away, they will grow back. The garden teaches a persistence and patience when faced with opposing forces. In times of war and in time of grief, too.

So much of our literature and art comes back to the garden.

Olivia: When I was writing The Garden Against Time, I put it really boldly: the garden is the antidote to war. It’s the opposite of war. Those are the two poles of human experience: war as people dropping bombs on people and cities versus the garden as a place of sanctuary. They seem to me two extremes of human nature and experience.

I was also really glad that when people wrote about gardens, they didn’t make them into ‘happy clappy’ sites; they, especially Hussein Omar, acknowledged the garden as a site of destruction that might not come back. It isn’t the case that the garden will always return and that we’re totally safe. There is this sense of imperilment, and the flowers, their fragility, really lends itself as a symbol of that. Their fragility is very moving.

Richard: They’re a symbol of very temporary, sprouting beauty that will not last.

A beauty that can come again but it’s not guaranteed.

Olivia: It’s not guaranteed, exactly. I think that feeling is very important. We have all this wonderful nature, but it’s not guaranteed. People have to fight to make it. People like Gerry Dalton think, ‘I could live in a council flat and have a rubbish dump outside, or I could make this wonderful and eccentric garden, Gerry’s Pompeii’. But it is fragile; it’s on rented ground. Will these places be secure or won’t they?

The garden is always in the teeth of catastrophe and disaster. As a gardener, you’re improvising. We’re both artists in different mediums where we have total control over that medium, and with a garden you just don’t. You have to be in a relationship with it. That’s radical as well.

Do you think gardening helps you with your artistic practice and your approach to art and writing? Is it a useful lens?

Olivia: Definitely. There are so many similarities in terms of structuring and editing, designing and pruning. But a book is at some point finished. When I’m working on a garden, it’s never finished. It’s constantly evolving, and it pushes back and resists in ways that a book doesn’t.

Richards: I’m not a gardener, but my partner is. So, I vicariously garden.

A gardener by association, I like it.

Richard: Yes, exactly. We only have a small concrete garden, so we grow mainly in pots. We’re slightly more in control of the garden because of that. I work in sculpture and found objects. There’s a lot of gathering, assembling and tweaking. It’s clay, it’s earth. I’m covered in earth every single day. There’s an element of control with sculpture, of manipulation, but then in the firing process, you have no control. Pieces can explode or melt and change shape, and, like with gardening, you have to step away from the idea of being totally in charge.

Olivia: You have a dream of what’s going to happen and then you have to improvise. That’s gardening, that’s creating any form of art.

Dan Pearson talks of giving the garden a ‘gentle steer’ in the direction you want it to go, which seems to apply to both creative practice and the garden.

Olivia: It was an interesting idea especially from him, because it’s so radical. He’s one of our greatest garden designers. He’s been involved in making all of these grand estate gardens which are very formal and beautiful. And where his practice is going is more and more allowing things to be wild within a design that is still created. The subtlety of that is really extraordinary. I was very excited when he sent it.

We have the ‘gentle steer’ approach to the garden, but there are a lot of other metaphors or phrases offered in this anthology for the relationship between nature and humans. There’s the idea of a war between the two, which quite a few of the contributors are trying to move away from, and there’s the idea of friendship. Sui Searle’s idea, also, of establishing ‘power with’ rather than ‘power over’ the garden.

How do you see your relationship with nature? Or, which pieces in the anthology did you most connect with in terms of how you view humans and nature, humans and the garden?

Olivia: I have a big problem with the idea that there’s a binary between humans and nature, because I think we’re part of it, we’re an expression of it. So, the pieces that attempt to dissolve that binary are the ones that I’m personally most excited by, rather than situating us outside of it. And people did write about that. Sui Searle, as you said, spoke about trying to strip away that thinking of humans as being outside and having control over nature, but actually thinking of the whole thing as one organism that’s expressing itself in different ways. That feels like the place to be.

Philip and Eileen Myles, too, subvert the idea of the dominant human, or of the human as the centre of meaning. Philip writes, ‘I realised that every garden is a time machine, and we are the ghosts,’ and Eileen, ‘I am growing something that will keep growing when I die.’ We made a quite emotionally open invitation, and people brought material that feels not at all nostalgic but interested in the way that the garden is a space to explore not just their own past, but also the future possibility of themselves. It’s a complicated fold in time. I was interested that more than one person thought in those terms.

That’s such an interesting concept, ‘a fold in time’. I had that sense with the image of the painted fig tree from Pompeii in the book. It was spooky to see a second-century-BCE painting of an ancient fig tree that looks exactly like the fig trees you see in London balconies today, unchanged by time.

Can we talk more about the idea of the garden as both ancient and eternal, as a ‘fold’ in time?

Olivia: Yes, I think that’s why we put so many deep time pieces into the book, like the fresco from Pompeii and the ancient Egyptian tomb paintings. I wanted it to be very clear that gardening and art are so deeply interconnected, and that it’s mattered so much to people to represent the garden for a very long time.

Richard: So much of our literature and art comes back to the garden. I’m not sure if this is true but I think that the very first piece of writing ever recorded in history was an observation in a garden, or, at least, a lot of ancient texts include gardens. Maybe there’s a connection in human history with the garden always being the space outside the human dwelling where thought happens. A place of contemplation. There’s certainly instances of the garden being a site for great ideas. Didn’t Newton discover gravity in a garden with an apple falling on his head? It feels like it’s been there from the very beginning.

Olivia: In Lisa Robertson’s essay on Ian Hamilton Finlay’s garden, she says that everything he writes, everything that she reads, all has its roots in the garden. The garden is like a workshop of ideas. It’s not just a physical place. And I wonder whether that’s a relationship that a lot of writers and artists share, that there’s a way that you can think things through, or experiment with ideas in a garden that makes it a compelling metaphor but also transcends its status as metaphor, too.

It’s outside, but it’s not quite complete wilderness. It’s provisional. It has this interesting status. Once you start burrowing into it, all of the cosiness falls away. Things become much, much stranger than they might initially seem. And at the same time, I was really happy that multiple people talked about childhood, suburban gardens that you might dismiss, thinking ‘nothing interesting goes on there’, and then people like Colin Stewart and Philip make them so radical and strange and Gothic. A lot of murderous, violent things happen in these gardens!

There were a lot of people confessing to crimes they’ve committed in the garden…

Richard: I suppose gardens are violent places, in the sense that there are animals constantly fighting and eating each other. Our sense of it is one of serenity and peace, and ‘oh look, a little bird’, but actually the little bird is trying to peck the other one’s eyes out. There is definitely a romanticisation which I find intriguing, how human representations make it far from what it actually is.

There is a violence and darkness, but there is also a lot of joy and love in the anthology. There are moments of play. Lee Mary Manning’s plant photos, for example, are very intimate and erotic. Alison Lloyd’s photo of the houseplant against the floral wallpaper achieved that playful tone, too.

Olivia: Kuba Ryniewicz and Lee are both quite erotic photographers, Kuba especially. I feel like the photography is really good at threading in a different tone. It makes the argument of the book more complicated. I think those photos are important. Pure pleasure.

Alison’s photo, for example, comes after Hussein’s harrowing, serious essay on Cairo, Gaza and mandrakes. Like we were saying with the garden’s clock, the anthology goes through the swells of abundance and play and joy, followed by loss and grief.

Richard: That image was from a series of works that Alison made in a house in Deptford in the 70s. Layering and creating tableaus that she would then photograph, looking at domesticity. It’s playing with the domesticity of house plants and the aesthetic of floral wallpaper, the different modes of the garden in our daily lives.

Finally, I wondered if you had a favourite slogan or quote from the book. Sarah Wood used the phrase ‘Hurry up slow down!’ in the anthology which I thought was such a brilliant line for the garden, and the anthology as a whole.

Olivia: That is good! We need another sticker.

Richard: We need a ‘hurry up slow down’ sticker. We’ve printed stickers to wrap the books in when we send them out, but we went with ‘reverse the enclosures’.

Much more direct, I like it.

Olivia: ‘Hurry up slow down’ would be good if there’s a second edition.

Richard: That can be the next one, that’s a good one. Thank you!

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Richard Porter is an artist. In 2017 he began publishing the work of his friends and acquaintances under the imprint Pilot Press. Today, its titles can be found in independent bookshops, academic libraries and special print collections around the world. In 2023, Pilot Press was shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize for Small Presses for the publication of the novel My Dead Book by Nate Lippens. In November of that same year, it published the anthology Responses to “Forbidden Colors” (1988) by Felix Gonzalez Torres, which raises money for the charity Medical Aid for Palestinians. Pilot Press is and remains an entirely independent solo artist’s project that receives no external funding or support. All profit from sales goes directly towards the development and production of its catalogue.

Olivia Laing is an internationally acclaimed writer and critic. They’re the author of seven books, including The Lonely City, Funny Weather and Everybody. Laing’s books have been translated into twenty-one languages and in 2018 they were awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction. Laing’s new book, The Garden Against Time, is an exhilarating account of garden-making and the long and troubled dream of paradise on earth. It was a Sunday Times number one bestseller and shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize and Kirkus Prize.

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