Got To Get Ourselves Back To The Garden

Periodically, I remember the massive hoard of photographs, several thousand of them, that I accumulated exploring the abandoned botanical garden on the Southampton University Highfield campus during my lunch breaks, and each time I remember I decide that, this time, I must do something with them. These pictures date from the very beginning of my transition from film to digital cameras in 2000 to my retirement in 2014, and range in size from relatively tiny 1.3 MP files (from my first digital camera, a Fujifilm FinePix 1300) to more substantial 16 MP files (a Panasonic G3). The past few weeks have seen yet another of these rounds of rediscovery, and I have once again resolved to extract the best of the best and do something with them. This time it's serious though; no, really. So here is a little text I cobbled together from various old blog posts to accompany them in any prospective book form:

The Expulsion from Eden

We were created to live in Paradise, and Paradise was designed to serve us. Our purpose has been changed: we are not told whether the same has also happened to the purpose of Paradise.
Franz Kafka, Zürau Aphorisms, no. 84

I have had a long, losing struggle with the tidy-minded and the fixer-uppers. From 1984 to 2014 I worked in Southampton University Library, and the campus that I knew between the 1980s and the early 2000s was a rich mosaic of neglected corners. Of these the richest was the Valley Garden, a couple of acres of abandoned orchards, overgrown terraced beds (originally planted to demonstrate taxonomy to botany students), and wonderfully dilapidated glasshouses, with at its heart a secret pond where great knots of frogs gathered every February for a breeding frenzy. I loved exploring this Edenic post-human spot at lunchtime, with its little stream that flooded regularly after heavy rain, turning the valley bottom into a marsh. When my children were at the university day nursery I would take them exploring here, too, and we would gather apples from the orchard and check on the progress of the frogspawn in the pond.

Most of the year, especially in winter, I had the place to myself. After a long morning enduring the boredom of meetings, I could escape into my private hortus conclusus, and document the regular small changes that would excite my eye, at first with film, then digitally: broken panes of glass scribbled over by snails, abandoned botanical experiments, the astonishing table-sized leaves of Gunnera manicata (the giant Brazilian rhubarb) that grow by the stream, the tell-tale traces left by invasive nocturnal thrill-seekers... Every day was a fresh page.

Eventually, however, someone in the university administration noticed this "wasted" space, and decided to re-develop it into a hazard-free leisure resource for staff and students. The Gates of Eden were chained shut and, lamenting, I was expelled into the world. For a time, as a substitute I took to photographing the allotments that occupied another corner, squeezed between the ever-expanding campus and the real world. Frustratingly, though, I could never enter this alternative Eden, but only gaze down into it over the fence each morning as I parked my car. Then the university noticed and bought those allotments, too, in anticipation of some new enterprise, probably a car park, and ejected the vegetable growers with their wonderful season-by-season improvisations constructed out of cast-offs, polythene sheet, and barrier netting.

In the intervening years, I somehow kept forgetting about the garden images, as I concentrated on newer, more purposeful photographic and digital-imaging projects. Recently, though, I revisited them – several thousand digital images taken between 2000 and 2014, ranging in size from 1.3 MP to 16 MP – and it was like finding the key to a locked drawer and seeing within, almost as if for the first time, some wonderful things. In fact, in there is some of the best work I have ever done, freed for the first time from the constraints of the medium-format film cameras I has been using, whether the mere twelve or fifteen shots per roll of film, the technical limitations of those bulky cameras, or the expense and effort of having the film developed and printed every week. I think something of this spirit of liberation found its way into the pictures I was making then, not unlike the feeling of lack of constraint that has accompanied my recent move towards iPhone photography.