The Glass Lantern

India · nature

A small glass jar lantern hangs from a branch, a tangle of green leaves framing the deep blue and cumulus sky around it. A garden's quietest piece of architecture.

Old jam jars repurposed as garden lanterns are one of the small pleasures of Indian terrace gardens. The jar gets a metal handle threaded through its lid, a tealight slipped inside, and the whole thing hung from a low branch with a length of jute string. By day it is just a piece of glass catching the light. By dusk it becomes the only thing in the garden you can find without looking.

I shot this one in the middle of the afternoon, when the lantern was simply a small bright object against a generous blue sky. The branches of the tree it hung from were lined with the kind of palmate leaves that always look slightly heraldic — five fingers spreading out from a single stem. Cumulus drifted past behind them. The lantern was empty, the candle long burned through, the wick still curled like a small dark question mark inside the glass. Some garden objects are best photographed in the gap between their two purposes — when neither the day nor the night has fully claimed them.

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