The Healing Garden

‘The Healing Garden’, is a series of photographs that looks at humanity’s use of tree and plant forms in both herbal and pharmaceutical medicine. Such discoveries were made during the Ancient Egyptian civilisation, where Juniper and Willow bark for example, were regularly used to solve everyday health problems. We have looked to nature for healing and cure ever since, though it is easy to overlook such connections in the frenetic world of today, where medicine is pharmaceutically mass produced and regularly comes in the form of tablets or liquids. Our knowledge has developed considerably over the last few centuries. The Echinacea plant is commonly used for respiratory viruses and Arnica flower for bruising, but do we ever think of these botanical forms as something from our garden? New discoveries of plants with healing properties are being made all the time. The Yew tree has provided us with treatments for cancer and Galantamine, a compound found in snowdrops and daffodils, is used to manage Alzheimer’s disease.

In some places I have combined two different trees or plants, creating several layers to an image. This is part of the narrative. The Yew tree has some Madagascan Periwinkles surrounding it and the detail of the pink Periwinkle flower has Yew tree shoots subtly blended through its petals, both of these cure Cancer.

This sequence of botanical images is created with the intention to highlight and remind us of this long-time dependence on nature for healing, with the hope of encouraging a better understanding of and greater respect for our environment. This should not be a one-way relationship. We need to look after the natural world, as well as it looks after us.