Beneath Ancient Boughs

I found the bench in the shade of the oak on a morning in late March, when the azaleas behind it were just past their peak and the light was doing exactly what I needed it to do. The tree was enormous—its canopy so wide that the bench beneath it was entirely in shadow even at midmorning—and its branches swept low in every direction before arching back upward, covered in Spanish moss that moved almost imperceptibly in the slow spring air.

The bench is a detail, not the subject. What drew me was the tree: the way its trunk divided into multiple massive limbs just above the ground, each one a tree in its own right; the way the moss draped from the outermost branches in long, silvery curtains; the way the whole form of it occupied the garden with an authority that the surrounding flowers—brilliant as they were—simply had to accept. The azaleas, visible in the background in shades of pink and magenta, gave the scene color and context without competing with what was, plainly, the dominant presence.

Flowers is an image about coexistence—about the relationship between the permanent and the seasonal, between what has been here for a century and what blooms for a week each spring. At scale on metal, every detail of the bark and the moss is preserved, and the depth of the garden behind the tree comes forward in a way that makes the image feel spacious rather than crowded. It is a piece that holds its own in a large room—which is exactly where an oak this size belongs.