The photographer Siân Davey was “navigating a family deep in crisis” when her son Luke suggested that they transform a neglected garden outside her rented cottage into a wildflower sanctuary that would draw people in. “And, without any ambition, something in me said a resounding yes,” she says. Together, they set about clearing the plot, researching local flowers and sowing them according to the rituals of a Buddhist faith they both share.
As soon as the plants began to flower, the people started to arrive, shaking off their everyday anxieties and repressions to expose their innermost selves. Many took the invitation literally and abandoned their clothes. Davey planted an old green velvet chair in their midst, for those who found the undergrowth too scratchy, and started taking photographs, which are now on display in a new exhibition near her home on the Dartington Hall estate in Devon.
A mother holds her daughter, who has a degenerative disease, skin to skin, in capable arms; a glamorous blonde, who on closer inspection turns out to be a man, luxuriates in a slinky pink petticoat (it is the first time he has worn women’s clothes in public); children stand among poppies as tall as themselves. Over the low garden wall, a neighbour looks on from a different sort of garden, with clothes drying on a line above a carefully mown strip that separates it from the agricultural landscape beyond. It’s a reminder of the limits of this temporary Eden, which is now in its third and final season. “I’m an artist not a gardener,” says Davey, who worked as a psychotherapist before turning to photography in her 40s.
She has documented her family in pictures that are now collected into books: Looking for Alice (2015) chronicled the early life of the youngest of her four children, who was born with Down’s syndrome, while Martha (2018) celebrated the social identity of her teenage stepdaughter.
Alice, who is now herself entering adolescence, appears in a red jumper, staring down her mother’s camera in the garden with the same defiant gaze that her older sister once had. Yet this isn’t a collection of life stories but something wider and more all-encompassing. “It’s a philosophical inquiry: the culmination of everything I’ve understood about being human,” says Davey. “It’s really touching when people step into the space because it’s democratic and free from judgment, and we’re all in it together.”
Though this is the last season for the garden, it will itself be memorialised in a book and a film. It may look like “a tangle of everything climbing over each other”, but maintaining it has been exhausting – as much about the process as the end result, beginning with the preparation of the soil and the careful sowing of the seeds. “Every project has a beginning and an end because it speaks of its time,” says Davey. This one came out of the Covid-19 pandemic. “We know nature is super-angry at the moment and it’s not going to be better until we start responding to it.”
The personal rewards of doing so are there for all to see in her photographs. “When the flowers open, there’s an alchemy that happens where they become witnesses to the human heart, so you get this extraordinary emotional landscape,” she says. “We’re very head-driven, mind-driven, but I’d never imagined that would happen.”
The Garden is at the Dartington Gallery in Totnes, Devon, until 10 September
