"In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore an eighteenth-century walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work brought to light a crucial question for our age: Who gets to live in paradise, and how can we share it while there's still time? Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton's Paradise Lost to John Clare's enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground funded...

Caught up in a centuries-old family conflict when he investigates a murder on the grounds of Shugborough Hall, Laurence Kingston tracks down clues pertaining to a code contained within an ancient, unbreakable garden monument.