Venice

‘Whether by theft or by artistry or by conquest, when it comes to time, Venetians are the world’s greatest experts...They bested time like no one else.’

Joseph Brodsky was a Russian writer who visited and wrote about ‘La Serenissima’, and whilst recently in the city I read his atmospheric book about the great city, ‘Watermark’. He preferred the damp and cold of a Venetian winter and is buried in San Michele, an island island near to Venice… I just came back from this magical city and over the years have been drawn back many times. A photographers dream… (all these images shot on Iphone)

Cottage Garden shades

The rich colours of early summer

Summer is in full effect here at Bowhay House and even by the time I have made first coffee, the light is a bit strong for subtle plant photography. So, it’s up with the lark (and house martins in the case of our place) and out with the camera at VERY early light. It’s always worth it though… Here are some of this morning’s show-offs; My favourite Allium (at the moment) atropurpureum, Astrantia ‘Roma’ (a gift from the excellent Old Court Nurseries in Malvern), Lupins that appeared from nowehere in the garden, and a rather amazing Geranium, (Geranium × magnificum I think?)… It gets very big and flops a bit, but flowers like mad!

I love how the garden changes so quickly at this time of year, and I’m hoping that with the ‘successional planting’ I will have much more to shoot as the month goes on. Hollyhocks are looking like they will be big this year, The roses look like they will be fab (plenty of feed during the spring) and there are plenty of lots of perennials to come (Asters, Helenium, Rudbeckia for example).

I have seen an advanced copy of my book, ‘A New Cottage Garden’ and it looks lovely (thanks to Pimpernel Press)… advance orders are being taken by Amazon (link to the book here)and it will appear in bookshops in early august. And Country Living are doing 4 seasonal extracts over the next year so I am very grateful to them.

Garden Photography april 2024

Bowhay House, Devon.

I am pleased to see my little cottage garden in Devon published this month by The English Garden magazine. I was less pleased to notice that the current issue (May 2024) is number 332… which, if, as I assume is correct, they have had one a month, it means that its now virtually 28 years old. I clearly remember by friend and collaborator, Vanessa Berridge, asking me to go and shoot three or four gardens for the first issues! blimey that’s scary and has set me back a bit ;-). Bowhay House is the subject of a book, ‘A New Cottage Garden’ due to be published in august by the wonderful Pimpernel Press… I wrote and photographed it and it was a real labour of love. Please do take a look when it comes out, or it’s available for pre order here…

Anyway, thanks to them for including my garden, and another I shoot at a garden called Daglingworth House (see below), which is a wonderful Cotswold confection, with pergolas, formal pond, boxing hares and a grotto… truly worth a visit!

I have been out and about this month (at last I managed to find a sunny day or two!), and had a nice morning recently at East Lambrook Manor, and then yesterday I revisited a garden I haven’t been to for MANY years… Marwood Hill in Devon. What a lovely place. So quiet, a valley that was reverberating to the sound of chaffinches, willow warblers and chiffchaffs. The mist was rising from the lakes when I was there and a statue of Dr Jimmy Smart, which is placed perfectly at the head of the valley, was a perfect focal point for this early morning image…

Autumn Garden Photography at Dartington Hall

Dartington Hall, near to where I live in Devon, is a 14th century great hall with elaborate gardens. It’s well-known for its dedication to the arts, education, and sustainability, and hosts festivals, concerts, and exhibitions. In the autumn mists, with all the muted colours and magnificent specimen trees, it’s a beautiful garden to photograph, packed with seasonal interest and atmospheric vignettes. I took my trusty Billingham bag, packed with a Fuji X-T4 with various lenses and had a lovely morning wandering along the paths and terraces.

There’s even a Henry Moore sculpture amongst the trees…

Recent work for C.P Hart Bathrooms in Wales, and Kelling Design in Northamptonshire

Lovely day’s shoot for the fabulously luxurious C.P Hart in west Wales. A really nice house in Pembrokeshire, with a classic bathroom beneath the eaves.

Bathroom in Wales, shot for clients C.P Hart

Day shoot for Kelling Design in Norhamptonshire. Colourful and classic, on a very HOT day!

A week in The Caribbean with P&O Cruises 'Arvia'

They said they wanted me to spend a week on board their new ship; in January. In the Caribbean. Ummmmm… difficult decision, but ‘Oh go on then’…

It may sound like the best of jobs; eat all you can, wearing just a tee shirt and shorts, and occasionally get an afternoon off to explore a quiet desert island. But, honestly, we did a lot of work and it’s actually quite tricky manoeuvring a tripod up 14 flights of stairs (actually there was a lift), but you get my drift. I shot restaurants (there are at least a dozen of them), cabins, theatres, and spa areas, and the weather was perfect. It’s so much easier to get a nice image of a pool if the sky is blue! Many thanks to the wonderful crew and management of P&O Cruises, who were brilliant.

And many thanks to the ever fabulous ‘Sunday’, a content marketing agency based in London who organised and drove the whole show… brilliantly done!

Back to normality now, I’m off to shoot a house for Grand Designs Magazine, and desperately hoping for some blue skies in Cornwall tomorrow!

A New Cottage Garden

‘Among the things made by man, nothing is prettier than an English cottage garden, and they often teach lessons that great gardeners should learn.’ William Robinson, The English Flower Garden, 1883

I am currently working on a book about Cottage Gardens and I need your help! We are looking for beautiful cottage style gardens, that I can photograph for the book, publication 2024 by Pimpernel Press, at some point during the coming year. We need gardens for all seasons, and anywhere in the UK (my preference would be in the south of the country, but thats because I’m trying to be sensible with travel!) The book will cover my own ‘new’ garden, and the process of turning it from a square of drab and lifeless lawn in to (hopefully!) an overflowing flower filled space thats good for wildlife. I will also be shooting inspirational gardens that illustrate what I am aiming for. I have been shooting a lot at Gravetye Manor, the former home of the ‘father of cottage gardening’, William Robinson, but I’d love to feature more ‘achievable’ gardens… I have a few on my list, but your suggestions would be welcome. Many thanks for reading this, and I hope you enjoy the images.

I’d like to thank the team at Gravetye Manor for putting up with my trudging around the garden this year at all hours and asking endless questions about their fabulous work there. Tom Coward (head gardener), especially, is a mine of useful information, not just about gardening, but also about William Robinson…

Please do get in touch if you can suggest any lovely cottage ‘style’ gardens, or indeed if you need a photographer… or just to say hello! email me or use the contact form on the website.

Garden Photography with the Fuji X-T4

I am not a tech wizard (as my family will confirm!) but I thought I’d do a quick review of the Fuji X-T4 camera that I have recently acquired. I have had many other Fujis over the years, including the X-T1 and 2, so I know my way round them, and have found them to be excellent. I have had one or other of these cameras around my neck for a few years now, mostly whilst either travelling, or documenting my local patch ( a lot of the time in the pub!). I shoot gardens for magazines, and until now have used my Canon 5D4 with a range of lenses. However, at the start of this year I bought this camera and took it out to shoot a garden locally and have not put it down since. It’s fantastic for this sort of work…. it’s easy to carry a ‘full kit’ in my smallish Domke camera bag, and it is light weight. I can shoot handheld in quite low light… a revelation because I shoot on a tripod most of the time and that can be awkward and heavy at the best of times.

The images shot here are thanks to Mothecombe House in Devon.

Coincidently I recently bought a smaller Manfrotto carbon fibre tripod, so all in all my rather delicate back is thanking me at the moment! Back to the camera though…. one of the nice things about this model is that it has built in ‘Image Stabilisation’ which is great for those slightly lower shutter-speed ‘grab shots’… the daffodil above is an example. I can get right down to ground level and shoot upwards in to the flower without spending five minutes adjusting the tripod! Actually, another thing I find useful about this camera is the improved back screen. I generally use the viewfinder, which is an excellent digital ‘EVF’, but the screen is now fully articulated so its easy to angle your view from low down, looking upward, without cricking your neck!

The colours of final images, once processed through Lightroom software are beautiful. I use RAW files, but there are any number of JPEG ‘looks’ to choose from. The sensor is not full frame (it’s a 26MP APS-C sensor) but I really can’t see the difference in the files, and I find the colours, whilst different to the Canon, are great. The greens and blues appear to be perfect. And everything seems to ‘pop’… they are sharp and contrasty and very natural looking. Just look at the Japanese Quince image on the left beneath, the reds are amazing.

I have a range of different lenses, and believe me there’s a huge number of different lenses available. I only really use three or four, and am currently looking at the Fuji ‘red badge’ zoom lens, 16-55 to add to the bag. It is supposed to be the bees knees in terms of an all-rounder lens for this camera. The camera build quality is fabulous, it’s all metal and very solid, and the dials are lovely to use. They are real, dedicated single-purpose individually marked dials for each of shutter speed, ISO, exposure compensation, advance mode, STILL/MOVIE mode, as well as a dedicated autofocus mode switch and two more general purpose control dials. I’m not really going to talk about movie mode, but apparently the camera excels as a video camera too. It’s quite a traditional looking camera, and I am constantly amazed at the number of people who comment on it when I am carrying it around… not that that is important of course!

I would never have admitted it before, but I occasionally now use autofocus (what???!!!), and it is a revelation. It’s pin sharp results are easy to set up, and when shooting portraits it’s a god-send. I recently did a shoot for UK Country Living, and the children had to run through a field. The autofocus setting was easy to set up and gave perfect results. Who would have thought it? the camera can be set up to follow either the eyes, or a ‘head’… and it works beautifully. How many times in the past have I had to shoot 50 exposures to get one thats in focus? This may all be old news to some of you, but for a garden/interiors photographer used to manually focussing, it’s brilliant!

In conclusion, the camera has been a great addition to my kit. I won’t use it for interiors at the moment (for a start they don’t make a shift lens yet), but for garden shoots it’s staying! My back will be grateful, and I’m blown away with agility and ease of use of this camera. I have noticed that its very slightly bigger than the XT-2, which feels nice ‘in the hand’, and the battery life is MILES better. The only thing I can think of as a negative is the menu system, which is still rather complex… generally Fuji are excellent at making things intuitive, but the menus are a maze that sometimes feel impenetrable! Otherwise, it’s a big thumbs up from me.

Happy Christmas!

A bit early I know, but wow, what a year we have had… we all hope 2021 will be a bit better, let’s toast the end of this mess and hope for better things. Wishing you all some good rest and relaxation… and do try to enjoy yourselves, even if it seems difficult. Things, as they used to say, can only get better… cue the music! love to all, Mark

Cosy fireside Christmas greetings!

Wild flower verges at East Prawle

Wild flowers found at Coastguard Cottages in East Prawle

If you are interested in persuading councils to NOT mow your local roadsides, please do take a look at the Plantlife website and sign their petition!

Late last year, we decided not to mow the verges alongside our small private road where we live. In only our first year of no-mow its been a revelation. The number of wild flowers has increased, and there are plants there that I had never seen before. Usually, the verges of the road are strimmed every couple of weeks, and this process obviously means that many of the natural plants are unable to produce seed. The next stage will be to mow after the seeds have set, in late summer. The result of all this is that verges are brimming with flowers and insects, and (in my opinion) it looks fantastic! Here is a list of some of the species I recorded just this summer…

Bristly Ox Tongue

Field Poppy

Ribwort Plantain

Greater plantain

Curled Dock

Broad leaved dock

Heath Bedstraw

Common Mallow

Wild Carrot

Perennial Sowthistle

Fennel

Greater Knapweed

Yarrow

Rough Chervil

Cats Ear

Red and White Campion

Scarlet Periwinkle

Creeping Cinquefoil

Field Bindweed

Herb Robert

Broomrape

Hairy Tare

Hedge Woundwort

Hedge Mustard

Nipplewort

Red and White Clover

Dandelion

Field Daisy

Birds Foot Trefoil

Small Flowered Cranesbill

Common Vetch

Hop Trefoil

Meadow vetchling 

Trailing tormentil 

Fleabane

Common mint

Common ragwort

Greater willowherb 

Hawkbeard 

Pineapple weed

Great mullein

Field scabious

Yellow rattle 

Hogweed

Spear thistle

Hemp agrimony

Agrimony

Common bent (grass)

Yorkshire fog (grass)

Ox-eye daisy

False oat grass (grass)

Christmas interior magazine photography

Its that time of year again, and I’m on the look out for houses that look great at Christmas time… colourful, cosy, well designed pads that I can shoot for magazines and make features of. So, if you have a nice place and you go to town at yuletide (I’m not sure I have ever used that word before!), or know someone who does, do let me know. We normally photograph in the couple of weeks before christmas, (or sometimes after new year), and its an informal affair, as long as the house is reasonably tidy (!) we can work miracles (christmas miracles!!). Keep in touch and let me know if you have any leads. And happy christmas ;-)…