SLEEPING BEAUTIES

previous seasons have disappeared. In Britain, winter can last five months, from November through to the following March.

Over the years, my local allotment has become a winter muse. Being just ten minutes away from my home, it provided a convenient place to shoot when conditions and schedule allowed. Spending time there, I began to develop the idea of capturing winter’s dramatic effect on a garden. I realised that different weather conditions increased the drama: frost and snow accentuating the line and form of topiary and trees; mist and fog creating skeletal ghosts punctured by the charcoal black of foreground structure. This stripped-back effect, with a virtually monochromatic palette, gave me the opportunity to shoot in black and white – a medium not normally used in garden photography. It offered a beautiful way to emphasise the graphic lines and forms in front of my camera. Colour became pared back, providing instead a background tone to the gardens, from the pale warmth of late autumn and the cool blue hues of January to the warmer tones and initial shoots of green in late winter.

The gardens in these photographs provide a perspective that is not often seen. Without the distraction of the previous seasons’ colours, there is an opportunity to show the skill of the designer’s hand that is usually hidden and the care that gardeners take in tending their work through those often-bleak months that results in a plot’s summer splendour. For me, giving a photographic insight into these dormant worlds is what this gallery of images is about.

CU RV E A PPEA L

An elegant wrought-iron moon gate from the 1930s welcomes wanderers into a walled garden in Sussex designed by Arne Maynard, where apple trees line the central path. ‘It felt like the sort of old-fashioned garden that I loved as a child and I connected with it immediately,’ Arne says