The Tamesis
After moving to California, the experience there began to change as our visits became more limited. It feels like time has been compressed. We would come for a month in early summer, briefly in the fall, and then again during the winter break. Each return comes with a quiet awareness that things are changing. When my mother decided in late 2023 and early 2024 that she needed to sell the house, the garden took on a different look. It begins to feel like a care record, something accumulated over decades that cannot be transferred or preserved in the same way.
In the work, the garden becomes both a physical space and a metaphor. It represents something my parents created, nurtured over time, formed through repetition and attention, and eventually lost. It is a living space that continues to exist even when we are far away from it.
book title, last garden tripcomes from a moment that remains difficult to articulate. After my father died, when the coroner came, my mother had them carry him around the garden on a stretcher for the last time. It’s instinctive, almost ritualistic. It’s a final gesture of love and acknowledgment of all that this space holds for them.
I captured that moment, but I couldn’t include the photo in the book. It felt too immediate, too unresolved. Nonetheless, this gesture remains at the heart of the work. In this sense, the garden is not just a place but a threshold where memory, love and loss converge.
