I can’t – annoyingly – remember who it was who recommended I read Olivia Laing’s very brilliant, recently published The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise – a book that I have enjoyed so much I want to thank whoever it was; although I also now realise that I have missed its launch at the Garden Museum, the opening of the garden itself, and a specially organised trip, all in June.  I am too late.

It’s about the garden of the house she and her husband, Ian Patterson, bought in Yoxford, Suffolk, but really a cultural history of gardening: the oppression of the landscape garden and its source in Caribbean wealth; William Morris and his garden at Kelmscott; Eliot Hodgkin’s pictures of wilderness flowers after the blitz; Iris Origo at La Foce; Cedric Morris and Lett Haines at Benton End; the consolation of gardens against fascism and all other forms of oppression.

I can’t recommend it more highly.