Gardens, photos, and new year's resolutions. Blog #5

Thank you for taking time to read my latest blog, which today is about gardens, not the one you have at home, but the ones you can visit if you are so inclined. It also touches on photography, and those promises you make to yourself at new year, but rarely keep. 

A new year usually heralds reassessment, reordering, clearing out, and a strong desire to start afresh. So it was that I came across my old notebooks, the ones in which I scribbled ideas and thoughts for possible stories, where I let my imagination run freely. However, I lingered over one notebook in particular, not an ideas book, but my gardening journal. It isn't much more than a list of dates against which I had written 'Lawns cuts' and 'Hedges cut'. There were the odd note about what setting the lawnmower should be on at different times of the year, and a reminder not to cut too short in hot weather. Whilst flicking through the pages I came across a section in which I had made some brief notes about the gardens I had visited over recent years. The first thing I realised is that I have visited quite a few, and when I looked at my photographs of the same, I had thousands of images, which were in no particular order.

By the way, I decided to start afresh with my gardening journal, so I bought a new notebook (with an appropriate green cover), promised myself that I would in future take lots of photographs of my garden, oh, and save them all into a new album I would create in my Google Photos. I also decided that when I take photos of any gardens I visit,  I will be more disciplined and organise them into new album folders to make retrieval much easier in future. You could say these are my new year's resolution. We'll see how long they last. 

I am not a gardener, but I like gardens, in the same way that someone can appreciate a work of art without having to be an artist. I visit gardens not to take photographs of panoramas or to macro photograph individual plants and flowers, no mater how interesting and beautiful they may be. I do, however, take photographs of 'objects' such as tree stumps, or water features, but from slightly unconventional angles or directions. For me the beauty of a garden lies in its form, its structure, its shapes, and its range of colours, and sometimes its history. Gardens are constantly changing, either through mans' intervention, or through the ever present seasons.

I could get all philosophical about the health benefits of wandering through a garden, but the physical and mental health benefits seem too self-evident to state.

My favourite garden? That rather depends. The one I visit most frequently is RHS Harlow Carr in Harrogate, simply because it's the nearest. I always drop into Wallington near Morpeth in Northumberland when I am in the area. I recorded in my gardening journal that RHS Rosemore in Cornwall was my favourite when visited in 2015, but others would be afforded that epithet now. Lanhydrock, again in Cornwall, is always nice to wander through, especially at bluebell time. When I holiday in the Cotswolds, Hidcote is a must.

Sorting through old notebooks made me think about a number of things, but mainly about gardening in general and visiting gardens in particular. 

I hope that if you visit gardens, no mater where they might be, that you derive as much pleasure as I do from them.

Please feel free to leave a comment about this blog.

Cheers

Mike.

©Mike Young 2023.