READING GARDENS
by GINA DOVER-JAQUES
Reading Gardens
Exploring Gardens through the Eyes of Those Who Know Them
Est. 2026
Gina Dover-Jaques is a garden photographer and writer exploring how people with specialist knowledge experience gardens through analogue photography, observation and writing.
Her work brings together photography, conversation and reflection to reveal how professional knowledge shapes the way we see and experience gardens and cultivated landscapes.
Understanding another person's way of seeing can change our own.
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?
Through analogue photography, quiet observation and reflective conversation, the project explores how specialist knowledge influences what draws our attention, where we pause and how we experience a place.
Rather than concentrating solely on the garden itself, Reading Gardens turns its attention towards the people who know gardens intimately, and the different ways in which their knowledge shapes their experience.
02 What is Reading Gardens?
Reading Gardens is a long-term documentary series bringing together analogue photography and writing to explore how people with different forms of professional expertise experience gardens and other green spaces.
Each study follows a specialist as they move naturally through a garden, without direction or a prescribed route. Observation comes first, with conversation and written reflection afterwards.
Together, the photographs and reflections offer an opportunity to discover not simply what someone knows about a garden, but how that knowledge influences their experience of being there.
03 The Why
Reading Gardens grew from a simple curiosity: what does someone with specialist knowledge see in a garden that I don't?
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.
04 Current Studies
with Advolly Richmond OBE, Garden Historian - Published 24 Sep 2026
Next Study - Spring 2027
Horticulture and therapeutic gardening
Exploring how the experience of caring for people might influence the way a horticulturist reads and cares for a garden.
Future areas of enquiry:
Stewardship · Cultivation · Design · Ecology
05 The Articles
