From the Lost Gardens of Heligan to Glendurgan, from Lanhydrock to Trelissick, Cornwall is home to a number of beautiful gardens. Unfortunately, as this project has run over the winter, many of the gardens I would have loved to visit have been closed, and they have not yet reopened due to the lockdown. In fact, when I first decided to include a garden in this project, they had already closed for the season - except one. One garden tucked away in Penzance was open for one more day, so I took the opportunity.
While it is not as well-known as Heligan or the Eden Project, Trewidden is not without its charm. With the winding maze-like route through the different habitats, and the small ponds dotted throughout the site, every corner of the garden is filled with wonder and beauty.
In 1850, the Bolitho family bought Trewidden Bal, an ancient and abandoned tin mine. Edward Bolitho turned it into an intimate woodland and began filling it with plants from around the world. Throughout the generations, the Bolitho family have worked hard on the garden, cultivating a variety of plant-life. The Tree Fern Dell is considered the best collection of tree ferns in the northern hemisphere, and under the current Head Gardener's guidance, Trewidden has been given the International Camellia Garden of Excellence status.
By this time of year, most of the flowers had gone, but the leaves were in their full, vibrant, autumnal glory. This was a chance to further explore my question of the impact red leaves would have on my infrared photography. While I haven't framed these images particularly well, I have captured the contrast between the red and green leaves. Infrared filters turn most green foliage a dull green-grey or even a bright white, but the autumn leaves blanketing the floor are still orange. Does the changing texture of the leaves alter the way they reflect infrared light? Is it simply the small range of visible light the 590nm filter is able to pick up that has allowed the leaves to keep their colour?
There were some areas with both stone and plant-life, and the infrared camera picks up the contrast between them well. Organic and man-made can look so starkly different. I had seen some photographers use particular editing techniques and, due to the clear juxtaposition of the natural and the manufactured, I thought this a good opportunity to test these techniques out. On the left are the images from the camera, shot with a 590nm filter. The trees are a ghostly off-white and the stone distinctly orange. To get the images on the right, I swapped the red and blue colour channels. This turned the sky blue and the leaves yellow, almost mimicking how we see it in full light, but with a certain air of not-quite-real. We feel uneasy, as if we're in a world that looks and feels like our own, but something is amiss.
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