Great Garden Influences - Ansel Adams

'Sometimes I do get to places just when God's ready to have somebody click the shutter.' Ansel Adams.

It's hard to believe today but in 1903, San Francisco was a city full of pollution, with clouds of smoke and airborne dirt hanging over it. When young Ansel Adams and his family moved from the city to the very edge, near Baker Beach, the clear skies and natural environment came as a revelation to the young boy, and were to shape the course of his life.

He was always a remarkable young man, hating the restrictions of the American education system, he decided to leave school, aged twelve, and educate himself!

At seventeen, he joined the Sierra Club, a group dedicated to preserving the natural world's wonders and resources. He remained a member throughout his lifetime and served as a director, as did his wife, Virginia. Adams was an avid mountaineer in his youth and participated in the club's annual 'high trips', and was later responsible for several first ascents in the Sierra Nevada. It was at Half Dome in 1927 that he first found that he could make photographs that were, in his own words, '...an austere and blazing poetry of the real'. Adams became an environmentalist, and his photographs are a record of what many of these national parks were like before human intervention and travel. His work has promoted many of the goals of the Sierra Club and brought environmental issues to light. His photographs remain some of the most compelling images of the American landscape ever taken.

Above all Adams loved nature and his constant efforts to persuade people to integrate the natural landscape into their gardens bore fruit, as the regimented Californian garden gave way to more natural spaces, containing native plants and using adobe as a sustainable building material - so the adobe walls we see everywhere today are an Adams initiative.

Garden Adams-style photograph by markagibson, used under a creative commons attribution licence