The garden is a place of renewal, reparation, and healing. Gardening and being in the presence of a garden can be a mechanism of restoring pain and suffering. Though it may seem like a very passive engrossment, there is an inclination to connect spiritually with nature as it offers therapeutic and restorative benefits. A way of dealing with loss for someone in my family was to immerse themselves in their garden and caring for it. Tending to the flowers and plants became a meditative experience and a separation from reality. The practice of care and control of the garden was a way of numbing the pain temporarily.

This informal contact with the garden was not comparable to the access that I perceived when visiting several gardens in healthcare centres and hospitals in London that had been designed for patients to experience calmness and detachment from the pain of living with an illness. The majority nonetheless revealed themselves to be impractical and with restricted accessibility. Most plants seemed in vital need of our care for them to subsequently heal us with their properties. The areas had been gated or bolted securely and were not easily accessible to those who were in urgent need of being in a peaceful environment like a garden. The strenuous effort of having to request for them to be unlocked transformed these humble spaces of healing into precious, unreachable, and isolated botanical sanctuaries.

In the film Modern Nature, film director and artist Derek Jarman uses his garden at Prospect Cottage in Dungeness to demonstrate how gardening can be a meditative process for dealing with loss, sorrow and pain. Jarman’s translation of the garden being both Eden: a paradise and Gethsemane: a site of anguish was provocative to my interpretation of the project idea and its critical engagement with media.

There is an unsettling tension intuited in the photographs that show a controlled access to the garden. The delicacy of the soft hands against the rigidity and harshness of the enclosure amplifies the distress of unsuccessfully attempting to reach this supposedly modest and natural source of healing. The repetitive monochromatic photographs of the private gardens and the style of the prolonged concertina intensify the exasperation and frustration of the unattainability of this desired space of comfort.

The restricted entry to the garden is amplified in juxtaposed images that show both irascibility and delusion in a cyclical and interminable composition. Having several photographs partially covered only showing a glimpse of what seems like a lush garden on the other side continues this endless irritation of the gardens being blocked by a fence or gate even when the templates are lifted. The black card mimics the rhythm of the physical boundary and emphasises a limited visibility of a barrier that continues to violently separate us from gardens that are widespread across our city, so close and so visible but impossible to reach. The fence has ultimately defined itself as a harsh boundary and hindrance to reach an inner peace that a garden and nature may offer. It has humanised the garden and intensified its fragility.