On photographing gardens
Cooperating with the inevitable
Why do gardens attract so many photographers? Edwin Smith’s photograph of a garden yields some answers.
There is a sense that a drama is being played out in this photograph, the inexorable growth of wilderness overtaking the artefactual nod to civilisation. ‘Co-operating with the inevitable’ is how Olive Cook, Edwin Smith’s partner, described his photography. Much the same can be said of gardening. The inevitability of a garden’s eventual demise reminds us, perhaps, of our mortality.
Gardens are complex places. They draw out social and historical facts and can also invite a journey of associations. If you are prone to something like the ‘metaphysical turn’ which befell the photographer Paul Strand in his final months in his garden at Orgeval (see Joel Meyerowitz’s selection of Strand’s photographs (2012) — ‘The Garden at Orgeval’, Aperture Foundation), 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 are complex places? The philosopher David Cooper (Cooper, D.E. [2006] ‘A Philosophy of Gardens’, Clarenden Press, Oxford) concludes that the Garden is an ‘epiphany of the relation between the sources of the world and us’.
Gardens point to the contingency of human existence. A garden must be given room to be within its nature if it is to occupy that narrow space between culture and wilderness. But it can only be left to a certain point before it ceases to be a garden. Beyond this, it loses its garden way of being, becoming less intimate, too wild to comprehend and take in in one go.
A garden’s success is based on a balance between order and chaos. Where this boundary is drawn is different in each case and changes with the seasons and the inclinations of the gardener.
In my 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. Keeping it at this point requires regular effort. If the wall were to fall, which it does on occasion, then it would have gone beyond the boundary that I have mentally constructed for it.
For me, the epiphany comes from the understanding derived from the play between the space that a garden tends toward and the place that I try to impose on it. This play between space and place, between my cultured self and my wild side, emphasises the fine balancing act that we all have to maintain.
Edwin Smith, the ‘man who lived in his eyes’, taught us to cooperate with the inevitable. What better way to understand this than taking photographs of gardens?
Let me finish with a poem by Fernando Pessoa, which encapsulates well some of the above thoughts.
Odes
By
Translated By
1.
Of the gardens of Adonis, Lydia, I love
Most of all those fugitive roses
That on the day they are born,
That very day, must also die.
Eternal, for them, the light of day:
They’re born when the sun is already high
And die before Apollo’s course
Across the visible sky is run.
We too, of our lives, must make one day:
We never know, my Lydia, nor want
To know of nights before or after
The little while that we may last.
2.
To be great, be whole: nothing that’s you
Should you exaggerate or exclude.
In each thing, be all. Give all you are
In the least you ever do.
The whole moon, because it rides so high,
Is reflected in each pool.
Copyright Credit: Reprinted by permission of the Estate of Edouard Roditi.
Source: Poetry (October 1955)
