Our Lockdown Garden

“Were it not for the shadows, there would be no beauty.”

Junichiro Tanizaki

An elderly woman with glasses smiling and talking on a cell phone while standing in a small glass porch outside a brick house at night. She is smiling and holding the door handle with her other hand.

Created during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, Our Lockdown Garden is a series of distanced portraits and collected stories made in collaboration with residents in their 80s and 90s at my father’s retirement community in Newport Pagnell, Milton Keynes.

Unable to go inside the building during lockdown, we gathered daily in the shared garden — walking, talking, and observing the slow changes of nature. The garden became more than a refuge: it was a space of exchange, confession and connection, where small shifts took on meaning, and evening light and long shadows revealed moments of beauty amidst uncertainty, and the wider losses in care homes.

Marking the occasion of the 75th anniversary of VE Day, the project reflects on living history through the memories and resilience of the ‘silent generation’ — the last to have experienced both World War II and the pandemic.

Coverage in Personal Work Journal, ILFORD PHOTO, Book, MK Citizen

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