As our visits became more limited after we moved to California, the experience of being there began to shift. Time felt compressed. We would come for a month in early summer, briefly in the fall, and again during the winter holidays. Each return carried a quiet awareness that things were changing. When my mother decided in late 2023 and early 2024 that she needed to sell the house, the garden took on a different presence. It began to feel like a record of care, something built over decades that could not be transferred or preserved in the same way.

In the work, the garden became both a physical space and a metaphor. It represents what my parents created, something nurtured over time, shaped by repetition and attention, and ultimately subject to loss. It is a living space that continues, even as we move away from it.

The title of the book, One Last Trip Around the Garden, comes from a moment that remains difficult to articulate. After my father passed, when the coroners came, my mother asked them to take him around the garden one last time on the stretcher. It was instinctive, almost ceremonial. A final gesture of love, and a way of acknowledging everything that space had held for them.

I photographed that moment, but I couldn’t include the image in the book. It felt too immediate, too unresolved. Still, that gesture became central to the work. The garden, in that sense, is not only a place, but a threshold, where memory, love, and loss converge.