Photo Corners headlinesarchivemikepasini.com
A S C R A P B O O K O F S O L U T I O N S F O R T H E P H O T O G R A P H E R
Enhancing the enjoyment of taking pictures with news that matters, features that entertain and images that delight. Published frequently.
Friday Slide Show: The Garden in Winter
14 January 2022
Thursday is our day to ramble over the estate, doing whatever yard work is required. It coincides with garbage day. So after we fill up our green bin with leaves and trimmings, we roll it to the curb.
But this is the first chance we've had all winter to do that because it's been raining and wet. You can't do much yard work when everything is wet.
So there was a lot to do yesterday. We didn't mind at all.
Our grandfather on our mother's side was loathe to garden. His father was a gardener at the Presidio Golf Club around the time Teddy Roosevelt was president. When he was ill, our grandfather would have to go in for his father or he would lose his job.
After a storm, my great grandfather and his friend who worked with him would pick up fallen branches and carve them into niblicks. They each had a son about the same age. And the boys would hone their swings with those salvaged branches.
In the 1930s my grandfather's friend became the U.S. Amateur champ. Twice. And my grandfather, who was a scratch golfer all his life, won the local links championship himself.
So when we bend down to pull some weeds or rake a few leaves into a pile or prune some branches from a tree, we think of my great grandfather. We like to imagine that our instinct about what to do is coming directly from his genes.
It's a comforting feeling. As if, in this environment of growth and decline, something persists.
So when we were done and dead on our feet, we grabbed the Olympus E-PL1 and put a +4 Lensbaby converter on the kit lens and took some closeups of some of the things we were happy to run across on our first maintenance day of 2022.
Over the years the garden has changed. Everything got taller or bushier but storms have brought down some favorite plantings. Birds have dropped seeds for new ones, gophers have tilled the soil. We have let things go rather naturally instead of imposing a formal plan.
And that has let us see both spurts of new growth and the withering of old life. And allowed us to imagine what will persist.
