The Reilly Garden

My dear friend Rose passed away last week.

Her contribution to my life over the past 30 years could

never be adequately honored here.

I would however, like to hint at the influence her wisdom, love and generosity has had over my art.

Particularly, Rose has always given me flowers from her garden. Before I was scanning, I used the color copier and other reprographic equipment to capture the ephemeral beauty of nature.

This is such an image from around 1990, featuring Rose's sweet peas.

The Reilly garden was one of the resources for my first scans, part of the original "neighborhood". A few years into my exploration of

scanner photography, Rose mentioned that her favorite flower was the Red Sword Crocosmia. Here in 2003, they flanked one of her nocturnal blooms.

In the spring of 2004, Rose's son and co-gardener introduced me to the amazingly resilient, delicately nuanced Hellebore. Every year since, I have collected and scanned the ever expanding Reilly hellebore collection.

Hellebore Bouquet 2004

Reilly Hellebores 2005

In 2007, I revisited and raided Rose's garden to work with her hellebores for an article about my work in Horticulture Magazine, written by Ken Druse.

Horticulture Hellebores 2007

This image is from last Spring.

The Reilly garden has also been the main source of hydrangeas used for my scanography. In fact, the scans featuring Rose's flowers would fill an entire website.

This panorama is comprised of the largest amount of Reilly Hydrangeas used in one of my images to date.

My appreciation for just this one aspect of Rose's contribution to my life and work cannot be done justice as a blog entry. I vow to show some snapshots of Rose's work soon... of her glorious, lovingly tended garden.