The Garden Keeps Giving

Friends,

As you know, last week I shared that I wanted to become more intentional with my photography.

For years photography was simply a way of documenting life. I photographed client projects, volleyball games, fishing trips, camping adventures, birthdays...if my family was doing something, chances are I had a camera nearby.

Lately I’ve been trying to do something different. I’m trying to tell stories instead of simply making pretty pictures.

This week I found myself kneeling at the bottom of the garden, looking up through the understory of the filberts and autumn olive, wondering how to tell one.

Over the past week, the children and I have been carrying old logs and branches from our wood pile onto the hillside. This weekend I started partially burying them to create little planting pockets. This fall we’ll scatter bell beans, soybeans, and other cover crops across the slope before covering everything with hay for the winter.

Right now...

It doesn’t look like much.

Just logs strewn all over.

A little dirt.

Some steep hilly empty spaces.

But that’s not really what I’m seeing.

I’m imagining the huckleberries we’ll plant beneath the future canopy. I’m imagining healthier soil, cooler shade, and another layer of the food forest slowly taking shape over the next decade.

That’s when I realized something.

I wasn’t trying to photograph the guava or the papaya.

I was trying to photograph a story that hasn’t happened yet.

Later that morning we finished harvesting.

We carried grapes, apples, peaches, tomatoes, zucchini, squash, some dahlias, and a bunch of zinnias back into the house and spread everything across the kitchen island.

For a moment, we just stood there looking at it.

The funny thing is...

I was weary from taking it as it seemed like “here’s another pretty photo”. Because it was not the story I had gone looking for.

But this photograph did tell a story. A different one.

Every peach represented months of waiting.

Every bunch of grapes had quietly ripened while we were busy doing other things.

The flowers weren’t decorations. They were part of the harvest too, filling little jars throughout the house alongside fennel blossoms, flowering mint, and lemon verbena.

The kitchen had become another room in the garden.

Maybe that’s what I’m learning about photography.

Sometimes the story lives in what’s already here.

Sometimes it lives in what is still becoming.

One photograph celebrates the harvest.

Another quietly points toward a hillside that, if we’re patient, will someday become something entirely different.

Both are true.

Both belong to the same garden.

And maybe that’s the real lesson.

Gardens are always telling two stories at once.

The one you can harvest today...

...and the one you’re planting for someone you’ll never meet.

Until next time, friends,

Teacher Todd