Plant Kingdoms of Charles Jones

Charles Jones is likely to remain for ever a mysterious figure. We know he was born in England in 1866, the son of a master butcher. We know he must have trained as a gardener and was employed on a number of private estates before retiring to Lincolnshire. We shall probably never know why he came so obsessively and so brilliantly to photograph the plants he encountered in everyday life at the turn of the last century. Yet here was an 'outsider' genius, who was saved from obscurity only by the chance discovery of his surviving prints in a London market. His techniques - close-up viewpoint, long exposure and spare composition - anticipate by decades the later achievements of modernist masters. The photographs themselves are Jones' only statement; he left no notes, diaries or writings to explain his reasons for the creation of such a prodigious and concentrated body of work, but beautifully reproduced here, their simple, unvarnished beauty is the perfect antidote to appetites jaded by processed food and 21st-century life.