ECCLESGREIG HOUSE
The path to the gardens of Ecclesgreig House is a slow descent, a slip-road into a different quality of time. On a summer’s morning, the air is thick with the scent of damp earth and the low thrum of bees. But to walk here with a converted camera, its sensor altered to see beyond the slim jurisdiction of human vision, is to seek a different kind of light, a ghost-light that lies just past the edge of red. It is to go looking for the garden’s spectral self.
The camera is a heavy, cold thing in the hand, a tool for translation. It sees not colour, but energy. It reads the world in heat and light, rendering the landscape into a language of pure luminescence. I raise it to my eye, and the familiar world dissolves. The process is called the Wood Effect, a name too simple for the transfiguration it describes. The chlorophyll in the leaves, so busy with the work of photosynthesis, is a brilliant reflector of infrared radiation. Through the lens, the deep greens of the rhododendrons and the delicate fronds of the ferns are not green at all; they are a stark, incandescent white. The garden becomes a snow-field in June.
Every leaf, every blade of grass, is frosted in this otherworldly light, blazing against a sky that has deepened to a dramatic, near-black void. It is a world inverted. The familiar becomes profoundly strange, a photographic negative of the waking world. The old stone of the garden walls, which in normal light seems so solid and present, here recedes, its cool surface absorbing the infrared waves and appearing dark and muted. It is the living things that shine, that burn with a cool, white fire. It is as if the life-force of the place, usually invisible, has been made manifest.
The garden’s stone figures stand as dark, silent anchors in this sea of light. A nymph, her face tilted to the sky, becomes a silhouette, her form absorbing the heat of the day. She is a void in the blazing scene, an island of shadow. But look closer, and life has claimed her. Patches of lichen bloom across a cheek and shoulder, a bright, spectral dust that shines with the same intensity as the leaves. This slow, tenacious life has drawn a new skin over the stone, a living map on a dead heart. The statue does not see the ghost-light, but it wears it.
To photograph the gardens in this way is to create a palimpsest. The image captures not just the place, but the energy that flows through it. It is a map of the unseen, a reminder that the world we perceive is only a sliver of the whole. Leaving Ecclesgreig, the ordinary greens of the landscape seem muted for a time, shadowed by the memory of that other, brighter world. The ghost-light lingers, a bright after-image burned onto the retina of the mind.