"…the vitality of what will be…"

I began photographing in winter gardens this January, in still-dark days though the sun was rising higher against the horizon each morning. Wandering around my own garden, neighbors’ gardens, public gardens, I was taken with the often isolated, spare forms left over from warmer months that held their own against whatever winter hurled at them and the wet muck and mush of dead leaves, dry grass, and snapped twigs. Surprising me most, I think, were the colors—warm and sometimes vibrant, cool and calming. All of them an unexpected delight.

As January wore on, and a darkness of a different sort continued to deepen, I realized that my small project had become a way to cope within my growing despondence, A way, certainly, to get out of the house (and off the internet) and give my mind a chance to settle, But also a practice that let me connect to something longer-lasting than the daily news cycle. Of course, I am not the first to seek out this refuge and strive to find respite, even joy or hope, in seemingly barren spaces. As I thought more about the project and how other artists had explored similar ideas, I stumbled across this 2012 Mary Oliver poem, "Lines Written in the Days of Growing Darkness,” from which I’ve taken the title of this series:

“Every year we have been / witness to it: how the / world descends
into a rich mash, in order that / it may resume. / And therefore / who would cry out
to the petals on the ground / to stay, / knowing as we must, / how the vivacity of what was is married
to the vitality of what will be? / I don't say / it's easy, but / what else will do
if the love one claims to have for the world / be true?
So let us go on, cheerfully enough, / this and every crisping day,
though the sun be swinging east, / and the ponds be cold and black, / and the sweets of the year be doomed.”