It's been just about five years since I began photographing Jon Carloftis Fine Gardens for Kentucky's one-and-only Jon Carloftis. I've been reflecting on that process and the beauty of the gardens captured in the book while I feel overwhelmed by what the world is throwing at us right now.

It was 2021 and — gasp — artificial intelligence was hardly discussed then in the mainstream. We were all blissfully unaware of ChatGPT and Claude and Grok and so on. Gmail wasn't constantly trying to make my emails sound better (more robotic, more slop!), and social media wasn't flooded with fake imagery and fake videos. Nothing makes me more frustrated as a creative professional than fake AI slop. It's appropriately called "slop" because slop is what you feed to pigs and we need all need to reject it as such.

Give me the real stuff. Give me the GARDENS; the BEAUTIFUL gardens. Like the ones in this book! I hope you enjoy some of this eye candy, and to give you a sense of the process of capturing it on camera, I'll share an excerpt from the book about what it was like shooting these gardens alongside Jon, the master gardener himself!

"I still marvel at the deliberate designs represented on the pages of this book, each one tailored to fit the needs and wants of the client — solving problems and evoking elegance and refinement while respecting the land's native characteristics. They showcase both human creativity and nature in all of their glory."

It was beauty that you could see, touch, smell and just be in. Be all in! A data center destroying beautiful farm land didn't make it. A creative person (with his cute yellow labs in tow) made it!

I hope you have a chance to pick up a copy of this book if you don't already have it. It will provide you with the perfect antidote to what the algorithms and news outlets are trying to feed you right now. Most of all, go outside and dig in the dirt yourself!