garden time is not like the ordinary time in which we live.
it moves in unpredictable ways sometimes stopping altogether and proceeding, always cyclically, in a long unwinding spiral of rot and fertility to pay attention to the garden as a clock means entering a different relationship with time - as circular not linear, as well as the acknowledgment that one of its recurring stations is death I'd been resisting its lesson chasing the high of perfection, feeling a failure when things browned or died back it was as if my job was to maintain the visual illusion- as if the garden couldn't possibly look good unless I'd succeeded in excising any evidence of death this was the more sinister legacy of Eden - the fantasy of perpetual abundance.
I was beginning to see what a poisoned fruit it truly was. so many of our most ecologically deleterious behaviours are to do with refusing impermanence and decay insisting on summer all the time. permanent growth, constant fertility, perpetual yield, instant pleasure, maximum profit.
Olivia Laing, The Garden Against Time
