Gardens
Spinners of dreams
Ursula Buchan
If you want to know why there has been such an explosion in interest in gardening in the last decade or more, look no further than the development of garden photogra- phy, together with the improvement in the quality of colour printing. The enormous number of high-class, highly illustrated gar- dening books and magazines now available owes a great deal to the skills of the mod- ern garden photographer. Never have images been sharper, more beguiling or, in PR-speak, more inspirational. Indeed, so good are the pictures and the colour origi- nation these days, that gardening features are now prominent in colour supplements and general-interest magazines as well.
Not surprisingly, many people who might well have resisted the allure of what are known as 'chatty' gardening books (those with plenty of text and perhaps a few line drawings) have found illustrated books much more to their taste. Even those of us who were already converts to gardening books have marvelled at how much more superior pictures have added to our under- standing and pleasure.
Demand has created a ready supply of professional garden photographers, even though the job requires very particular qualities. Apart from having the obvious, though unusual, combination of technical acumen with artistic sensibility, they must be tireless and meticulous, with a patience which Job might have found excessive.
In the summer months, they move cease- lessly from garden to garden, here and `You really believe in this Second Coming, then?' abroad, sometimes with a caravan hitched to the back of the car, so that they can sleep on the spot and be up before dawn to catch the best light. Long before the gar- den owner is astir, they will be making a ghostly progress around the garden, noise- lessly slipping between shrubs, leaving no footprints in the border soil, the only signs that they are human, rather than ethereal, being the step-ladder, tripod and box of lenses which accompany them everywhere.
Even in winter, they are out very early catching the rime on seed heads before the rising sun can melt it, or snow on the hori- zontal branches of Comus controversa. They seem to rise above the discomfort of being motionless for long periods outside, in all weathers and in all seasons. Yet, despite this almost obsessive care and con- centration, garden photographers are remarkably good-natured and clubbable. They sometimes need to be: persuading a frosty old-school dowager to allow them the freedom of her garden requires tact and social case.
In order to make the most alluring pic- ture, a photographer will naturally remove any blemish from a composition. Slug- chewed flowers, random fallen leaves, an ugly building beyond the garden: these are studiously removed, or hidden by artful camerawork. It is a matter of professional pride to do so and, anyway, if he did not, his pictures would not sell. The effect of light is changed, or intensified, by the use of filters, lens hoods, reflectors and flash- guns. Even where the subject is neglect and decay — a clump of nettles by a broken- down wall, say — the picture will somehow be invested with a potent romance. Flowers shot in the rain always seem to glisten, rather than hang sad and sodden. No gar- den, no flower even, looks quite so perfect as a skilful photographer's pictures can make them.
Because of this, photographers (and the art editors who commission their work) are sometimes criticised for providing (and expecting) images which are 'unreal'. In one sense, this is self-evident. A frozen two-dimensional image of a moving three- dimensional scene cannot possibly be 'real'. But what is meant is that they can create a deceptive impression. Photographers would argue that it is often our own perceptions which deceive, our imaginations which exaggerate or refine. Moreover, the camera can reveal detail, even the essential nature, of a plant or garden which the more care- less eye of the spectator does not divine. And the frame of a picture inevitably gives a coherence and compositional unity to an otherwise more formless scene.
I can buy all that but, in the case of blown-up pictures where plants are por- trayed more than life-size, or when a wide- angle lens distorts the dimensions of a garden, I suspect I am being taken for a pleasant ride. But I just don't care. Photog- raphers may be spinners of dreams but gar- deners are willing dreamers.
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