The Why & The Origins

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Reading Gardens is a long-term documentary project exploring how different forms of professional expertise shape the experience of gardens and cultivated landscapes.

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The project grew from a curiosity about what someone with specialist knowledge sees that I don't. What does their knowledge cause them to notice? Where do they stop? What draws their attention? What changes their direction? How does what they know influence the way they interpret what is in front of them?

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At its heart is a simple question: what happens when we experience a garden through the attention of someone who knows how to read it differently from us?

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The project begins with Reading Rousham, following garden historian Advolly Richmond OBE through Rousham Gardens in Oxfordshire. Future studies will follow people whose different forms of professional knowledge offer distinct ways of reading and understanding gardens.

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Together, the studies explore how knowledge influences attention, interpretation and movement through place, and how understanding another person's way of seeing can change our own.

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The Origins

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Reading Gardens brings together people whose professional knowledge shapes how they experience gardens and cultivated landscapes.

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Each collaborator brings a different perspective, whether informed by garden history, horticulture, therapeutic practice or another discipline. Their knowledge influences what draws their attention, where they pause, how they move through a garden and what they find significant.

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My role is to observe rather than direct. Through analogue photography, I follow their experience as it naturally unfolds, allowing their individual way of seeing to emerge.

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Together, the photographs and their subsequent written reflections offer an opportunity to experience a garden through someone else's eyes.

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