Years ago, a friend of mine, while here in the potager for a magazine shoot, observed a tendency, a preference, a practice of mine...
to plant and photograph and evaluate my garden...through things.
I had not noticed this tendency (as one so often doesn't notice characteristics in oneself...but relies on others to detect them...and then share them with us).
As I strongly believe that gaining self knowledge is crucial to the art of becoming a better human being (an admittedly lofty and elusive thing) I've thought a lot about his observation since then. This desire to see and look through one thing to appreciate another. In my garden, this impulse is usually...
expressed in the form of a sculpted branch, a lattice tuteur, a congregation of stems, the airiness of a blossom, or a teardrop of rain.
In a broader sense, as a metaphor to life, as a way of interacting with the world and with others, I wonder what it means. What lesson is there to be learned?
A want of transparency and clarity...
or a need of a filter, a barrier, an interpreter...of what is beyond my vision,
or out of my grasp... the familiar and the unknown. Such are my thoughts as I shape the redbuds, thin the Golden Vicary Privet...
and admire the delicacy of new growth and a new season.
Seeing and looking through the one...to frame and interpret
the other.