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Hello and welcome to Spectators Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator,

and my guest this week is

the writer Olivia Lang, whose new book is The Garden Against Time, which is an account of

making a garden, but much, much more than that. Olivia, welcome to podcast. For some of your readers,

I think, who are accustomed, particularly in your autobiographical novel Crudeau,

you know, you feel like someone who's incredibly nervously alive to kind of the disasters

of the world pouring in on you digitally. And yet here you are doing what seems to be

completely the opposite. Where did you get this sudden kind of urge to garden? Actually, the gardening goes all the way

back right through my life. I think it's much more of a core activity of mine than writing. My parents

got divorced when I was young and my father spent all of his weekends indoctrinating us in the pleasures of

the stately home garden.

And I love them. I loved them as sort of beautiful, secluded places.

But then as a kind of rebellious teenager, I came across Derek Jarman and read his book

Modern Nature, which is about making the famous garden at Dungeoness.

And I just got obsessed and enchanted by the idea of

the radical garden. And really, when I look back at that book now, I think it set out this

sort of blueprint for my life. I ended up training as a herbalist before I became a writer

...