Before
This past spring I had a photo shoot with GARDEN GATE Magazine. Yesterday, the person who will be writing the story contacted me about setting a time to visit about some details...its design, plant selections...well, you know. She also asked me if I had a before picture. Before the bed lines and bulbs and shrubs and grass and, basically, before my evolving garden-personality-over-lay was in place...because, after all, that's what a garden is.
After
As I may have told you, I started my garden here when I started my family. A full 24 years ago. Pre-digital cameras, pre-Instagram/FB/Twitter, pre-cell phone photography. Pre- instant image and instant record of any and everything at any and every point in time...
pre-knowing much of anything ABOUT anything...about gardening, about parenting, about marriage, about the messiness of life. (Okay, I did know a little bit about that.....)
Back then, taking a picture held much more import.... was much more ceremonial, intentional... (happily I did take a before image...to show my parents in Indiana a picture of the new house Husband and I had just bought)...overall, just more special, because of its relative scarcity compared to today... when we photograph anything and everything (multiple times) with abandon.
Still, digital imagery has been..............well, simply transformative.
I have been helping a friend with his landscape over the past several months. It is nearing completion and when I visited the garden yesterday to do a punch list of what remains undone, the owner commented as to how much it had changed...and that he regretted not having taken any before images. I told him that I had some to share........
so that we could see how far it had come, the contrast of the before and the after. The importance of taking images of the present......which will soon then become the before as the season changes, layers are added, time has past. So comfortinglt, achingly.... cyclical, circular, certain.
4 YOUR GARDEN
Please join me and Linda Cavanaugh on Newschannel 4 at 4:30 as we visit about selecting and ordering bulbs NOW for planting this fall.
*** The GARDEN GATE MAGAZINE shoot will be a six page spread in their January/February issue. Subscribers will receive their copy mid December. It is the first national magazine shoot of
the front landscape in spring...when all of the tulips and their supporting cast is in bloom. I'm very excited and I hope you will be on the look out for the issue! Subscribe to GARDEN GATE here.