A photographer's dramatic Devon garden, rooted in the elemental landscape that surrounds it
'Yesterday it began. Over on the high moor, the sun’s light and warmth have at last released the hawthorn blossom. We live just above the 1,000ft line and must wait until late May for this over-whelming moment. For the next 20 days or so, this is the place to be,’ says the photographer Garry Fabian Miller. ‘On the brightest mornings, the hawthorn trees accumulate an astonishing volume of radiating, sparkling white light. This is the blinding light I have often worked with to make a picture.’
Garry’s intense, slowed-down observation of the natural world is at the core of his artistic practice. He is recognised as one of the most innovative fine-art photographers of his time and his radiant, colour-filled work is held in collections all over the world. His inspiring journey has been entirely self-guided; he did not go to art school. As a young teenager, he helped out at his father’s commercial darkroom; by the age of 19, he was exhibiting at the Serpentine Gallery, W2. Nearly 50 years later, he has a major celebratory show, Adore, at the Arnolfini in Bristol, and
Dark Room (Bodleian Library Publishing, £40), charting his work over five decades, came out in March.
Every morning, Garry walks from his garden onto a windswept Dartmoor in an easterly direction towards the dawn. Every evening, he sets out again, westward towards the sunset. He rarely travels, heading instead to the garden studio he designed, an elegant wooden building surrounded by a pool of green, with silver birch grazing its roof. The mesmerising garden that Garry and his wife Naomi have been making for 33 years is ‘a manifestation of the life lived here, which has been the backbone of all the work I’ve made as an artist’, he explains.
‘When I was 16, trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life, discovering the land artist Richard Long was important,’ he adds. ‘So was a visit to Margery Fish’s garden at East Lambrook Manor in Somerset. I strongly recall feeling part of intimate domestic living, the house and the garden joining together. As I walked its twisting paths, I began to understand that the making of home and garden would provide the foundation for my working as an artist. I had discovered the garden as a deep personal response to place, made over time by the people who inhabit them.’ He later came across kindred artist-gardeners, from Dorothy Wordsworth to Derek Jarman, who further shaped his ideas.
It was during a period in Lincolnshire that Garry created his first garden. Then, in 1984, came the transformative idea to make pictures without a camera, using plants he had grown. ‘It occurred to me that translucent plant tissue might be treated in the same way as a colour film trans-parency,’ he says. He placed a single leaf in the head of the enlarger and passed light through it, producing an ‘airborne image’, from which he could then create a cibachrome print.
He spent the next six years making exquisite sequences of images – of poplar leaves or honesty seedheads – that chart the passage of time. ‘I remember watching the petals falling from an honesty flower and the seedcase emerging like a tear. The sunlight drew forward the chlorophyll, the weather dried the sheath and the processes combined to generate a wonderful palette of mauve, turning green, then red, pink – eventually fading to translucent white, with the whole history of colour contained within it.’
Garry’s marriage to Naomi, then a museum curator, led to the discovery of Homeland in 1990. Dating from 1912, the timber-clad house ‘was ugly and painted with brown creosote, but it had the feel of a Quaker meeting house – and a couple of acres’, he says. The entrance was already home to a scattering of moss-covered boulders, a quiet invasion from the elemental moorland beyond. He set to work on the garden: ‘I remember spending autumn and winter afternoons with our baby son on the ground, sticking 18-inch hornbeam and yew saplings into trenches. I didn’t make a plan, but it seemed to make sense at the time.’
To arrive at Homeland today is to feel wrapped in a powerfully ordered, sculptural landscape. Between towering hornbeam hedges, bulging shapes of yew jostle with the boulders and spill onto the curving drive. Nearby is the apple orchard, inky with Camassia leichtlinii ‘Caerulea’, and a sharply cut yew circle, shimmering with half-moons of wildflower meadow.
As Garry’s work then continued to develop into dazzling abstract works of pure colour, so the garden evolved, too, becoming both simpler and more dramatic. An ambitious herbaceous border came and went, and the acquisition of eight acres of woodland led to an important shift from controlled landscape to a new, more natural heart of the garden at the valley bottom.
Smooth mown paths take you through bluebell-speckled long grass towards the woodland garden. The mood here is different – deeply respectful of time and place. Huge boulders border a rocky stream and ancient oaks spread magnificently among exuberant ferns. Naomi is now shaping this part of the garden. After years of taming, she has planted wild daffodils and dogtooth violets for spring, a grove of pale Cornus kousa and, by the stream, silver-edged Iris sibirica and colourful candelabra primulas.
We talk about the garden they have made over tea and excellent cake. ‘I get a huge amount of satisfaction from having done it and am grateful Naomi is now taking things forward,’ says Garry. ‘We’ve created a place where we belong and I feel very happy here. I’m not in the best of health. As we deal with what the future will bring, being here will help. The garden is a powerful part of our family’.
Eva Nemeth1/5Colourful candelabra primula thrive on the banks of the stream, along with Iris sibirica, ferns and foxgloves.
Eva Nemeth2/5A Canada goose leads her brood across the wildlife-friendly garden to the pond.
Eva Nemeth3/5Existing moss-covered boulders are echoed by clipped mounds of box and yew by the drive at the front of the house.
Eva Nemeth4/5A curved yew hedge forms the yew circle close to the house and serves as a backdrop to one of a pair of Lutyens benches, perfectly placed for admiring the wildflower meadow with its mix of pignut and Camassia leichtlinii ‘Alba’.
Eva Nemeth5/5The granite setts of the front path pick up the grey of the silvered cedar roof shingles.
