Green fingers

A tribute to my grandmother

Since becoming a grandmother myself I have been thinking a lot about my own grandmother and what the role entails. I was very close to mine when I was a young child, less so in teenage years and later. I wish so much I had asked her more about her life.

When I look through the family albums my favourite photographs of her are the ones taken in the garden. There she is, wearing a succession of printed summer frocks - gardening, feeding the birds and squirrels, hanging out the washing, reading, knitting or sometimes just sitting. The garden seems inextricably bound up with her identity or maybe that’s just how I remember it. Her love of gardening, wildlife, knitting has been passed on through the generations down to me, whether by nurture or nature I don’t know.

As a tribute to my grandmother I have made these images, superimposing pictures of her in her garden over the last 20 years of her life, onto photographs of my own garden, fusing the two into one celebration of life in the garden.

Digital collage of scanned family photographs and my own digital photographs. Printed on archival matte Hahnemühle Rice Paper mounted on brown envelopes, made into seed packets.

2023