Kristie De Garis takes refuge in the polytunnels of Perthshire’s Tomnah’a Market Garden.

As I stepped out of the car, summer rain hissed against the windscreen, quickly building to a wash of static.

Jacket over my head, I walked the narrow path to the polytunnels, its edges overtaken by summer growth. Grass seed-heads brushed my shins, and lemon balm released its scent as I passed. Everything was reaching, blooming, sprawling.

Through the wooden doors, the air turned humid and herbal, thick with the smell of flowers. In front of me, voluminous bubble-gum-pink roses. Above them, dill plants held their yellow fireworks and, fading into the distance, pink and purple pincushions.

I crouched on the warm, dry dirt and listened to the downpour — a percussive symphony on the taut plastic sheets overhead. Next to me, fuchsia echinacea tangled with pristine daisies, and spires of lilac salvia rested against wooden stakes. The humidity and the polytunnel scattered the light better than any piece of my overpriced photography kit, making the colours more themselves.

I’d fought the urge to photograph the flowers for two years. I hadn’t wanted to be a cliché, nearing midlife and filling SD cards with intimate close-ups of petal and sepal. And wasn’t it plagiarism to simply capture the beauty of something beautiful? Now, in the absence of alcohol and in the sharpness of sobriety, Tomnah’a Market Garden had become a refuge.

On my first visits here, I rushed in, a slave to my senses, lost my fucking mind, and photographed every single thing. Looking over the images at home, outside the fog of aesthetic delirium, all I could see was wet enthusiasm. No discipline. No composition. Fervour rather than flowers.

After dragging two hundred files to the trash folder, I decided to swap digital for film. Not for the romance of it, though there is romance, but because it would force me to pause. To think. To weigh up whether this moment, this tangle of leaves, this little bit of light was worth a frame.

There was no way to check if I’d gotten the shot, no way to delete and try again. And again. Film meant commitment to the process, to the moment, to myself. Indulgence would become intention.

I rose and set my empty camera bags on a small wooden table beside a leaning tower of plant pots. The warm air carried the smell of damp earth and sun-baked wood. As I wandered the space, my eyes kept moving, settling for a few seconds before darting to something else. A manic feast of floral maximalism.

For thirty minutes, I let my cameras hang from my neck and simply noticed. The coming together of texture, colour, proportion, and space. The way the lines of the flowers, doing what they wanted, interacted with the lines of the structural beams, doing what they needed. The orange of a calendula echoed in the rust of a broken spade.

Slowly, my brain began to see balance within the visual clamour.

Crouched low, dried leaves pricked against the skin of my knee. Looking down, I saw a tideline of dirt around each toe. The air was cooler here, edged with petrichor and something more mineral. Beneath it all, the sharp green scent of broken stems. With the warmed metal of the camera against my cheek, I steadied myself. As I let my breath go, slow through my nose, I adjusted the focus and pressed the shutter.

Two rolls of film later, something clicked in me too. Not a grand epiphany, just a quiet shift. I wasn’t trying to be anywhere else but here. I was fully in mind and body, not trying to climb out of them.

The flowers weren’t just pretty things (though they were so pretty). They offered clarity — a way back into my body, back into presence. They steadied my gaze and gave me something to respond to, something to build with. Not an exit, but an entrance. And that felt good.

Not in the way alcohol felt good, fast and fizzing and then gone. This was slower. Sturdier. No longer collapsing, but creating.

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Kristie De Garis is a writer, photographer, and drystone waller living in rural Perthshire. This piece is an adapted excerpt from her debut book ‘Drystone – A Life Rebuilt’, which will be published by Birlinn Polygon on 7th August. 

Visit Kristie’s website here / follow her on Instagram here.