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Reading Gardens
UK Photographer & Writer Exploring Gardens and Historic Landscapes

Gina Dover-Jaques investigates how people with specialist knowledge experience gardens through analogue photography, observation and writing. Her research-led practice explores how professional knowledge shapes the experience of gardens and cultivated landscapes.

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Understanding another person's way of seeing can change our own.

Introduction

01 Introduction

Gardens are often photographed as places of beauty, history or design. Reading Gardens asks a different question: how does professional knowledge shape the experience of a garden?

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Through analogue photography, observation and reflective conversation, Reading Gardens begins with observation rather than interview, following specialists as they move through significant gardens to explore how expertise influences attention, interpretation and movement through place.​

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​Reading Gardens offers a different way of thinking about gardens, not simply as designed landscapes, but as places experienced through knowledge. The project explores how expertise shapes attention to better understand what professional knowledge reveals about the experience of place.

Reading Gardens

02 What is Reading Gardens?
 

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A long-term documentary series exploring how different forms of professional expertise shape the experience of gardens and other green spaces.

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Each study follows a different specialist through a significant garden, exploring how knowledge influences observation, interpretation and movement through place.​

The Why

03 The Why
 

Reading Gardens grew from a simple curiosity: what does someone with specialist knowledge see in a garden that I don't?

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My photography has always been rooted in observation, watching carefully, allowing things to unfold and recognising the moment rather than directing it. After moving from photographing people to gardens, that same way of working began to raise a different question: how does knowledge influence what we notice, where we pause and how we move through a place?

 

Reading Gardens grew from that question.

Current Study

04 Current Studies
 

Inaugural Study:

Reading Rousham

with Advolly Richmond OBE

Garden Historian​

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Published 24 September 2026

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Planned series:

  • Stewardship - A Head Gardener - currently in development

  • Cultivation - A Grower

  • Design - A Landscape Architect

  • Ecology - An Ecological Steward

Portfolio

05 Articles Portfolio

Rousham_Advolly_Richmond_Historian_Gina_Dover_Jaques_Photography_May_2026 55.jpg

Reading Rousham with Advolly Richmond OBE

Visit article

Contact

06 Collaborations

Reading Gardens develops through collaboration with people whose professional knowledge, practice and relationship with gardens offer a distinctive way of reading landscape.

For Collaborators

Each collaboration creates a considered photographic and written record of practice, alongside an opportunity for reflection on the ways in which expertise shapes our experience of gardens. Where appropriate, completed studies may also be developed for editorial publication.

The inaugural Reading Gardens study, Reading Rousham with Advolly Richmond OBE, has been published in the Garden Media Guild Autumn Quarterly.

The full study, including the complete photographic series and written reflections, is available to read HERE.

Interested in collaborating: I'd love to discover more.

Email me HERE

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Current Study

Reading Gardens is made possible through the generosity of those who give their time, knowledge and support to the project.

With thanks to Advolly Richmond OBE, Rousham Gardens, the Garden Media Guild, Kimberley Hornby George, Daniel Hatch, and Tamsin Westhorpe for their encouragement, support and contributions to the development of Reading Gardens.

© 2026 Gina Dover-Jaques.

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All photographs, negatives, scans, written materials, and other content on this website are the intellectual property of the artist unless otherwise stated, and are protected under UK copyright and intellectual property law.

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No content from this website may be reproduced, distributed, published, archived, transmitted, adapted, or used for automated data collection, including scraping, data mining, machine learning training, or dataset generation, without the artist’s prior written permission.

For more details click on this LINK

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