Still in shock from debate, I self-soothe in my garden

"I was exhausted by the perpetual, agonized now of the news," the brilliant art critic Olivia Laing writes.

- HEATHER MALLICK

Gardening is a balm for everyone, Heather Mallick writes, even for the Toronto gardener working on a tiny front patch.

So, she began work on the first garden she had ever owned, having "an inkling that the gardener is initiated into a different understanding of time, which might also have a bearing on how to preclude the apocalypse we seem bent on careering into." Laing's new book, "The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise," examines the value of gardening Philosophically, do private gardens even exist, given that all land was at one point stolen, serially? Humans, expelled from Eden, made a mess of the land they lifted from the planet. Can gardening repair it? It's a balm for everyone, even for the Toronto gardener working on a tiny front patch. People like parks.

They thank other people for creating small city gardens even as, depressed by the state of things, they don't tend their own.

Every spare patch should have a tree, which the city will deliver and plant for free. Maybe people think it won't help, but we need shade desperately. A tree asks nothing of the owner or the passerby.