Green Spring Gardens

Author's Comments

Green Spring is the kind of place I recommend when someone tells me they want to photograph a garden and not a destination. Twenty-seven acres in Fairfax County, a 1784 manor house at the center, and a series of small demonstration gardens that reveal themselves as you walk. None of it announces itself. You come around a hedge and find the aquatic garden quietly working away in July, lotus pads floating in dark water, and you realize you have the whole thing more or less to yourself. I prefer midday here, which is not what I say about most places. The shade gardens hold their own against overhead sun, the fragrance beds are at their most active in warm air, and the boxwood parterre behind the manor reads cleanest when the geometry is lit evenly from above. This is a garden that rewards the detail shot more than the wide frame. A single bloom against the old brick of the manor. The curve of a lily pad. The particular green that only boxwood does. Come in late May or in July. Bring a macro lens if you have one, and expect to move slowly. Green Spring is not dramatic. It is careful, and it has been carefully tended for a long time, and that patience shows in the way every corner holds together. That is its own kind of photograph.

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