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Cambridge Garden Diary: May 2024.

The room where I am sitting is in darkness.

A midday sun struggles to penetrate the thickening leaf screen that overhangs the lattice window by my chair. On one side mock orange leaves crane forward, eagerly seeking light, their premature scent-flowers long dropped in February. On the other side buddleia and pyracantha muddle together in a tangle of fading purple and white. July butterfly flowers are already browning to seed-plumes. Autumn berries are swelling to pregnant green in anticipation of over-wintering birds.

Draping over everything white bryony nets reach out tendrils like snake tongues, as if testing the air. Entwined with spreading tentacles of convolvulus they engulf the self-seed host of weeds thrusting through ornamental paving in the front garden.

I peer out into bright sunshine. A brown butterfly I do not recognise is warming itself on a sun-yellow dandelion, wings splayed wide, ignoring a large foraging bee. Fragile silken threads spun by an unseen spider link shrivelled seedheads of spanish bluebells to aphid-gorged spikes of garlic mustard. In a cream cup-flower, trapped in strings of sticky dew, a small un-named fly struggles to break free.

How can I know enough to clear it all away?

'Where Bluebirds Sing' is part of a longer-term ongoing project 'Living with Weeds' to promote the beauty and fascinating complexity of weed ecologies as potentially resilient havens for biodiversity against climate change. Many thriving weed edgelands teeming with wildlife of 'lesser scientific interest' may soon be destroyed as Grey Belt for house-building and other development. My underlying motivation is therefore activism, working with other voices to create local commitment to the centrally important plants and creatures in places where I have some influence - gardens, verges, parks and local nature reserves in Cambridge where I live.

The portfolio 'Where Bluebirds Sing' consists of four 'classical' triptychs of twelve digital montages of close-up photographs, linked by a loose narrative referencing the children's fairy story 'the Bluebird' by Maurice Maeterlinck. A 'fairy of light' visits two children in a very poor family. She tells them if they want to help their familly they need to go on a journey to find 'The Bluebird' that is the source of all happiness. They travel far and wide through lands of darkness, heavenly paradise and misty seashores. They find and cage many bluebirds. But the birds all escape or turn black. In the end they discover the 'true' bluebird at home.

'Where Bluebirds Sing' interweaves religious, mythological and literary imagination into this narrative, together with scientific discoveries about the amazing powers of plants. I seek to complement rather than replicate the growing body of powerful documentary environmental art about species under imminent threat of extinction or portraying anthropocene destruction and pollution. Through manipulating boundaries between 'photographic truth' and our human propensity to anthropomorphise the world around us, I aim to inspire the viewer to ask themselves profound questions about 'reality', 'truth' and human responsibility in an increasingly threatened world of anthropocentric obsession with control and domination. The images evoke life's mysteries, ambiguities and uncertainties in the era of global warming and climate change. There is no inevitability about fairy-tale endings.

To open and enlarge images click on an image. This will open the Lightbox for each Triptych.

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Cambridge Garden Diary: May 2024. The room where I am sitting is in darkness. A midday sun struggles to penetrate the thickening leaf screen that overhangs the lattice window by my chair. On one side mock orange leaves crane forward, eagerly seeking light, their premature scent-flowers long dropped in February.