Chasing the Light: Inside the 45-Year Career of Garden Photographer Clive Nichols
Garden Photographer Clive Nichols
There’s a moment in every photographer’s life when they realise they are no longer simply taking pictures they are waiting to create magic through their lense. Waiting for the light. Waiting for stillness. Waiting for a garden to reveal itself.
For Clive Nichols, that moment has stretched across more than 45 years.
“I don’t really take pictures to please somebody else,” Clive says quietly, sitting by the fire in his countryside home. “I take pictures that I love. If I like it, I’ll take it. If I don’t, I probably won’t.”
It’s a deceptively simple philosophy from a man whose work has appeared in hundreds of books and magazines, who has photographed some of the most important gardens of our time including HRH King Charles III’s private beloved Birkhall garden in Scotland and who is widely regarded as Britain’s greatest garden photographer.
The Secret Is Always Light
If there is one word that defines Clive Nichols’ work, it is ‘light’.
“It’s absolutely vital,” he says. “The light is the key to all photography — but in gardens, it’s the essential ingredient.”
He speaks about light the way a musician speaks about rhythm. He checks weather forecasts obsessively, cancelling shoots repeatedly until conditions align.
“When I see clear skies and five-mile-an-hour winds, that triggers me to go out and shoot.”
That commitment often means brutal starts.
“I’ll get up at two in the morning and drive 50 or 100 miles to be there for dawn.”
Why? Because gardens behave differently at that hour.
“In the morning you get dew drops, cobwebs, atmosphere. Things are still. That’s when gardens feel alive.”
How Clive Nichols Takes The Perfect Garden Photograph
Before Clive ever lifts his camera, he studies.
“I do a recce of the garden, sometimes I even run around it,” he says. “I’m picking up views and waiting for the right light to hit them.”
He rejects the common advice to shoot with the sun behind you.
“That gives you very flat light,” he explains. “I shoot towards the sunlight. It creates shadows, depth, and backlights plants so they look like they’re lit from within.”
His kit is surprisingly simple but deliberate.
A tripod (“I use it a lot, especially in the morning when there’s no wind”)
Lens hoods on every lens (“They stop flare when shooting into the sun”)
Minimal post-production (“I want it to look natural, as it was when I shot it”)
“I don’t waste shots,” he says. “[Shooting on] Film taught me to compose carefully. I might take 100 shots in a garden and only discard two or three.”
A Life Built on Beauty
After photographing billionaires’ gardens around the world, Clive has learned something unexpected.
“All they want to do is what I do,” he smiles. “Be in nature. Take pictures of gardens.”
Photography, for him, isn’t just a career it’s a way of being.
“I’m always looking for beauty,” he says. “Gardens suit my personality. They make people feel good.”
And that, perhaps, is why his images endure.
“I hope they thrill people,” he says. “Lift their spirits. Give them escapism.”
After 45 years of dawn starts, cancelled shoots, frozen mornings and perfect light, Clive Nichols still believes he has the best job in the world.
It’s hard to argue.
Clive Nichols discusses his career, and the philosophy of garden photography with Mykal Hoare on The Gardener’s Lodge podcast.