The Reclusive Gardener

click on images to enlarge

 

These are some samples of my wife Virginia’s  art: 

a backyard shade garden in a suburb  of Washington DC.


 

 

How different Virginia’s art is from my own which is photography; they’re almost opposites in fact. Her art work is ephemeral and changes from hour to hour with light and shadow, with time and the seasons.

 

 

But these records of her garden are permanent and unchanging although they fix a moment in May that vanished even before the pictures saw the light of day.

 

 

But one day the garden will completely vanish. Maybe someone new will replace the garden with a patio; maybe time will slowly turn the garden into a vacant lot.

 

 

Then we’ll look at the photographs again and notice they too have changed. They have subtly aged, much as a building ages, and now all that’s left of that moment in May are these photographs and our memories of all the other shifting seasons in that garden’s life.

 

 

 In our mind, the memories of the garden echoing with children, or withering in the heat of Summer, or hidden under the snow, slowly evaporate, to be replaced by these few pictures in an album.

 

 

The camera doesn’t smell flowers or feel the wind. The camera is a machine that only sees the present and is oblivious of the future.  It shows us the past as an illusion of present time and we tend to forget that the garden only really looked that way to the camera for a few minutes in May of the year 2008.

Photographs are a sorry substitute for experience or memory but as we stand in the blank future holding the garden in our hand, they are all we have.