Gardens do something to me …

One of my favourite garden photographers: Edwin Smith –

Being complex objects, gardens occupy an existence at many levels. Not only can they draw out social and historical facts, but they can also invite a journey of associations. If you are prone to something like the ‘metaphysical turn’ which befell Paul Strand in his final months in his own garden at Orgeval ¹, which in my case is an anti-metaphysical turn (a metaphysical turn of sorts), then you will already have regarded lawns, flower-beds and ornamental gardens in a certain way, exemplified perhaps by how statues gaze Atget-like across parks.

Such a realisation must have struck the likes of many garden photographers in their time, such as Paddy Summerfield, Siân Davey, Vanessa Winship, Jem Southam and others before them.

But what does it mean to say that gardens ‘occupy an existence at many different levels’? David Cooper in ‘A Philosophy of Gardens’² concludes that the Garden is an ‘epiphany of the relation between the sources of the world and us’. My take on this is that the Garden points to the contingency of human existence, the struggle between culture and nature. Gardens are allowed to have a nature and have to be given room to be within their nature – to ‘let-be’, using Heidegger’s term – if they are to occupy that narrow space between culture and nature. But they can only be ‘let’ to a certain point before they cease to be a garden. Beyond this, they lose their garden way of appeal, becoming less intimate, too wild to comprehend and take in. Their success is based on some order but pretending to be like nature, if you will. Where this boundary is drawn is different in each case and changes with the seasons and the inclinations of the gardener.

In my own case, the cultured tumbled-down nature of my garden acts as a counterpoint to my neat, ordered life. I strive to place the boundary as if nature is winning back its own space, for example, a wall made to look as if it’s falling down. Keeping it at this point requires constant vigilance. If the wall was to actually fall down, which it does on occasion, then it will have gone beyond the boundary that I have mentally constructed for it.

For me the epiphany comes from the understanding derived from the seeming inconsequential: the play between my own cultured self and my wild side, my own interpretation of ‘good manners’, and from reflecting on how such balancing acts are maintained.

Walking through a garden or park invokes a phenomenological inquiry whose essentials can be fixed with a camera.