thoughts and themes

The Other Gardens is in part a photography project inspired by my favourite book as a child; "The Secret Garden" by Frances Hodgson Burnett. I had the good fortune of growing up within walking distance of my own version of the secret garden. My family home and many of our neighbours homes and farms were built on what was at one time a large estate comprising of not only the main house and its various outbuildings but also several orchards and gardens built in approximately the 17th or 18^Th century. On the very edge of the property by the shore of the river Shannon was a large walled in garden.  By the time I came along, part of an Orchard still stood and here and there you could stumble across fragments of various outbuildings but most importantly, the garden by the water remained , almost untouched. Of course by then it was a jungle and time and exposure to the elements had toppled parts of the wall but this just added to the appeal. The original landowner had apparently spent his life collecting what were then exotic plants. Unusual trees, hundreds of years of old were dotted around and inside this walled garden. As a child I spent hours climbing them, tracing their outline with my fingers, pressing my ear to their bark to determine if I could hear them growing, breathing, living. One of my favourite trees had these huge bulbous forms emerging from every side of its trunk and I used to imagine this tree had so much personality a simple trunk would not suffice. In one corner of the garden there was a grove of rhododendron plants, by then as large as trees. When they bloomed, they were the most beautiful thing I had ever seen; each plant comprised of several trunks curving out and upwards like the fingers of an open hand. A cocoon of pink and purple flowers on the outside, still and bare on the inside and easy to shimmy up and down, each plant its own quiet cave.

What I took from my childhood reading and exploring was a love of the search and sometimes an obsessive adherence to observation, for I found that simply remembering to look was half the journey towards finding something inspiring and other worldly. The garden was even more special to me because it seemed that everyone else had forgotten it existed and so it became mine. The prize was not only in the finding but also in the seeing, the awareness that I had found something, the awareness that so much of enjoyment was about appreciation. For me, really looking was so closely linked to appreciation it was hard to tell one from the other. And so everywhere I have lived I have looked for these “secret gardens” and no town or city has ever disappointed. My notion of what constitutes such a place has expanded and the simplest way I can describe it is “place as muse”. Industrial or natural, thriving or in decay, there is something striking about it yet not in such an obvious way that you can find it in most tourist guides or any in many cases. Overall I think I still gravitate to places I would have loved as a child, places that would have made the perfect cubby hole or made me feel as though I had stepped into one of my story books, places that seemed ripe with possibility and mystery and otherness. 
The parameters for this project are that every garden is either situated within the city limits of my current home- Galway, Ireland -or within a few miles of the suburbs. All the gardens can be viewed by anyone should they stumble in that direction. Some have boundaries in the way gardens do and for some their beginning and end is only marked by the confines of my camera lens and the circle I draw on the map to say “this, within here is the garden”. So they are to various degrees gardens of my own creation. Some of them are seasonally sensitive, more strikingly beautiful at one time of the year than another. As the project has expanded to include graffiti and other forms of spontaneous public art many of the places I document may be quite temporary but I shall divide them into places that can still be viewed and those that no longer can. So in a way it is a case of city as gallery. Feel free to send me suggestions for other gardens. I am just as curious to know the places that resonate with other city dwellers. I expect the project to expand but this is how it starts.

Neasa O Grady