This is all the same winter garden as experienced during a period of less than three hours, first in day and then in night. Notice how the deep dark velvets and jewel tones sing out mostly in the daytime, the dark spaces drawing you in; how the pinpricks of light take over by night, the lights drawing you irresistably out towards them. In fact, going from one to the other in quick succession is like looking at the same photo seen in negative.

Notice, also, how the unexpected blossom (really, there’s blossom coming out already!) shines out all the more against winter’s canvas for being so unexpected against its slate-skied woodiness. How the hardly noticed feature of a moongate (a circular opening from one part of the garden into another) comes newly into its own when backlit by lanterns in the indigo of a darkest December evening so that stepping through it is like suddenly discovering the moon a cosmic portal and the universe a brick garden wall. Yes, the garden of a winter’s day can be so very magical dressed up in all its pearls of glistening moisture and its ruby-red berries but then, in its darkest persona, that garden becomes most magical of all, defying all spacial logic to make all things seem possible, reinventing all that you thought that you ‘knew’ with your eyes not so long ago…

In the week of the Winter Solstice, the very tipping point of dark into light, the contrasting performances of this garden could not have felt more apt; a delightful surprise on this year’s visit to West Green. You can see the entire collection of photos in my Flickr album, the Yin & Yang Garden.