He Lived with Nature: He Watched it Come and Go

I made this piece thinking about the elders — the ones who kept gardens without calling themselves gardeners, who knew which tree flowered when, who watched a whole century of weather from the same veranda.

The stitching is quieter here than in some of the other pieces. There’s a stillness I wanted, a listening. When you live long enough with a landscape, you stop trying to hold on to it. You just watch.

This is a piece for anyone who has lost someone who loved the land — a grandparent, a parent, a neighbour whose garden you still walk past. It’s also a piece for anyone becoming that person themselves.