The pictures in A garden is a long time take us beyond the perimeter of the Central Otago garden where they were made. Incorporating processes and materials from the darker, more mysterious corners of the medium's early history, they give an account of the life and sensibility of a remarkable artist, Annemarie Hope-Cross, who lived from 1968 to 2022.

With Jenny Bornholdt's poetry and prose treading deftly around the edges of her life and work, it is a meditation on time, light and the spaces we all inhabit. For Hope-Cross the medium was at once a science and a miracle; the camera was an echo chamber, and each picture a place where past and present met, where the living communed with those lost along the way, and where the most ordinary plants and objects were rendered mysterious, at times radiant.