American Museum & Gardens, UK

Only mad dogs and Englishmen would head out to a garden in the noonday sun in the middle of a heatwave. But I’m always up for a challenge, and photographing the gardens at the American Museum just outside Bath in the summer of 2022 was great fun – bright pops of colour, swathes of naturalistic planting, a recreation of the vegetable garden at Mount Vernon, all glowing under a pure azure sky. Sure, the light was harsh, to say the least, but the garden certainly showed no signs of flagging. When every garden for miles around was suffering in the exceptional heat, this relatively recent creation by the US design practice Oehme, van Sweden was performing nicely, a showcase for the use of American native species in Britain’s increasingly unpredictable climate.