Home Comforts: Olivia Laing on the wondrousness of wild roses and reading in the bath

Olivia Laing isn’t easily put into a box. A mercurial master of an author of fiction and non-fiction, she has a literary sleight of hand that means, while appearing to write about one thing, she manages to make us think of much, much more. A walk along the banks of the Ouse in the footsteps of Virginia Woolf (To the River) becomes a treatise on the way history is woven into landscapes, for instance; her musings on subjects such alcoholism (The Trip to Echo Spring) or solitude (The Lonely City) become philosophical studies of human experience, simultaneously expansive and personal. In these journeys of discovery, Olivia plucks out the threads that connect us all and gently tugs.

That her home in Suffolk – “near enough to the sea to drive home in a wet swimsuit” – is not so readily categorised perhaps comes as no surprise. She describes it as “a muddly sort of one”: a Georgian house made out of two Tudor cottages, “with some excellent 1960s additions that let in the light”. It’s in here that she writes, lately while thinking about what’s outside – no prizes for guessing which earthly delights have informed Olivia’s new book, The Garden Against Time, published May 2024.

My most recent home improvement…
Putting up shelves and painting them yolk yellow. My husband is a retired academic, a very retired book dealer and a not-at-all retired poet and he has an enormous hoard of books – 20,000, maybe? – so we’re always trying to find shelf space. Every room is full of piles of them. I recently spent a very satisfying day putting a lot of old paperback novels into alphabetic order. Muriel Spark is now in her proper place, so is Penelope Fitzgerald.

The latest addition to my wardrobe…
The last thing I bought was a beautiful, enormous shirt by Steven Stokey Daley. It’s made of pale-blue striped deadstock, with a 17^th-century print of poppies over the top. As a result of my new book, I’ve been dreaming my way through old herbals for years, so it felt like a good reward for getting to the end.

The most useful item in my kitchen…
My husband, Ian. I don’t cook. I’d live off muesli if he wasn’t there. I do like the butter dish and the toaster though.

What’s always in my fridge…
Milk. Got to have a cup of tea at 7.30am and 3.45pm.

The prize bottle in my drinks cabinet…
I don’t drink spirits, but there’s always a lot of wine knocking about.

Hanging on my walls…
A lot of my friends are artists, so the house is stuffed to the gunnels with work I’ve been given over the years. Paintings by Chantal Joffe, Sargy Mann and Pat Porter, photographs by Kuba Ryniewicz, Mary Manning and Sophie Davidson. Ceramics by Richard Porter and Carl Williamson.

Ian is extremely gifted at country auctions and has an enormous collection of prints, so my stuff jostles up against lots of 18^th-century maps and scenes of London or Italian gardens. He found a painting by Derek Jarman the other day that I think must have been done when he was still at school.

The knick-knacks on my mantelpiece…
Two Staffordshire soldiers on horseback that everyone mocked, but I love them. They’re very melancholy. Well, one is dyspeptic and the other one is melancholy. They wear sashes and at Christmas I make them garlands out of tinsel. A pair of candles. A Christopher Logue print about William Blake, which is extremely bright pink. A Staffordshire pearlware figure of a girl reading. She’s wearing a sprigged dress like a girl from a Jane Austen and she’s holding a taper to see by.

The books on my shelf right now…
I’ve just finished Wish I Was Here by Mike Harrison. I like reading in the bath but there were so many good lines I had to keep getting out to write them down. Brian Dillon’s Affinities. The Englishman’s Garden, edited by Rosemary Verey and Alvilde Lees-Milne, which might be my all-time favourite book. Living Rooms by Sam Johnson-Schlee, which is one of the most exciting, surprising and radical books about interiors I’ve ever read.

The music on my stereo…
Purcell and Brian Eno. Mozart operas. The Pet Shop Boys.

Growing in my garden…
A very exciting species of peony has just flowered: Paeonia delavayi. It’s blood red – actually it’s the colour of slightly dried blood. For the last three years I’ve been restoring a walled garden in Suffolk, which is what my the book, so I could actually write thousands of words on the plants here: sweet woodruff, medlar, quince, wild roses… A lovely inky iris opened this morning. That was exciting.

Hidden away in my cupboards…
Boxes from my grandfather’s flat, which I can’t bring myself to throw away, even though he died more than two decades ago. A summer cargo of deckchairs and cushions, no doubt nibbled by mice.

On my to-do list…
Plant out my sweet peas. I’m writing an essay about the painter Celia Paul, which is emerging from a written conversation we’ve been having. It’s a very stately way to conduct an interview. She’s in Venice on a residency and I’m in Suffolk and though we’re writing emails, the conversation is moving at such a lovely slow pace that it’s almost as if we’re writing letters with pen and ink, sending them back and forth on a steamer.

Further reading

Olivia Laing

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