The Fleeting Moment

A garden in movement, in harmony with the landscape, into which it blends without losing the touch of the person who has imagined and created it in that particular place. Organic masses that merge, establishing a link between formal and informal, between the overall view and every single detail that plays a part in this vision. A place that thrives on light, wind, colour and form, and on wildlife too. This is the perfect subject for Marianne Majerus, a photographer who lives in close connection with plants and flowers – observing them and trying to understand them, just as she would with a friend – waiting to take the perfect picture.

Born in Luxembourg, where she has returned since Brexit, Majerus lived in England for 45 years, and it was in that land, home of some of the best-known landscape designers and gardeners, that she began her career as a photographer, initially experimenting with various fields such as food, design, travel reportage and portraits (some of her photos are in the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery in London). It was only in 1996, when a British newspaper proposed that she photograph and publish a different garden each week, that she discovered her passion – or rather ‘healthy obsession,’ as she prefers to call it – for capturing images of plants and flowers. Since then she has never ceased photographing nature, winning awards and publishing dozens of books that have immortalised gardens all over the world, with a predilection for those of the Italian countryside, where in her view designed landscapes blend in best with the surroundings that have inspired them.

Among the many books she has published, she likes to single out Garden Design: A Book of Ideas brought out by Octopus Publishing Group (2015) with which she won the prestigious Garden Media Guild Award for Book Photographer of the Year. The over six hundred images in the volume offer an effective documentation on the designers, their works and the botanicals that animate them. All filtered through her lens, which succeeds in capturing not just the visible side of a landscape, but also the feelings that it stirs. “I like to immortalise the fleeting moments,” she explains, “breaking the rules of classical composition and emphasising the vitality of what I observe.”

Her pictures, in fact, fix a precise and poetic instant, made up of grasses waving in the wind or trees and shrubs that create depth of field and form botanical backdrops without ever stealing the scene. For Majerus the garden is a place in which nature and culture meet, through the art and science of horticulture. “Here landscape designers re-create their vision of Paradise working in collaboration with plants and always with their consent. Only in this way is it possible to connect with nature, perceiving its strength and fragility through the seasons. And absorb its energy.”