A couple who passed by the garden on their way to swim in the river are pictured lying on the grass in an embrace, the last sunlight gleaming on skin and hair. Many of Davey’s subjects are topless, or entirely naked-a gesture, she says, that occurred spontaneously at her subjects’ suggestion, rather than at her request. Yet the photographs are extremely intimate. We see a gable made of honey-colored stone, a slate roof, evidence of nearby human habitation. The garden itself is exposed-the wall that separates it from the street is only two feet high. In the garden, life is resurgent, at first tentatively and then fervently. Rather, the images capture the strange and heightened atmosphere of that moment, and the tenderness that prevailed after a period of enforced stillness. How many tears have I seen in the garden?” Davey’s series of photographs of her friends and neighbors, pictured amid riotous blooms in warm sunlight, is a document born of the pandemic, even though there isn’t a discarded blue surgical mask or half-filled bottle of hand sanitizer in sight. “People came to the garden wall and cried. “When the flowers came, so did the people, in a very different way,” Davey went on. By the time the first lockdown ended, in the early summer of 2020, the garden was bursting into bloom. They had been isolated for a long time, and those stories began to be woven into the garden,” Davey, who worked as a psychotherapist before she took up photography a decade ago, recalled. A year later, when it had grown in, neighbors would stop by and talk. It took twelve weeks to clear the ground, and hours of painstaking research into seeds and cultivation methods to plant the garden.
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