A historian by profession, I took to gardening when we moved into a house with an old garden in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1996. Ours is a terraced city garden, now designed very much in the English style, with lush mixed borders. Our favourite plants are hellebores, hostas, ornamental grasses, roses, hydrangeas, camellias, japanese maples and stewartias.

Having given up photography in the 1990s (with cupboards full of Kodachrome slides), the advent of digital photography tempted me back to my old hobby, mainly to document the progress of our garden project and our visits to gardens all over Europe. Having started with Nikon Coolpix cameras, I now use full format Nikon DSLR. I shoot in RAW and process the images in Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop and Nik Software.

I have founded three Flickr groups dedicated to gardens:

www.flickr.com/groups/citygarden/

www.flickr.com/groups/swissgardens/

www.flickr.com/groups/zurichgardens/

An die Gartenliebhaber aus dem deutschen Sprachraum: Falls Du die Bildlegenden lieber auf Deutsch hast, findest du die meisten Bilder (und noch ein paar andere) auf meiner Website www.secretgardens.ch

I take a special interest in the history of my borough, Zurich-Hirslanden, where I've been living since 1996. I founded a digital picture archive which can be found on www.flickr.com/groups/hirslanden/

Another Flickr group I initiated is dedicated to the architecture of Otto Bickel-Schirmer (1894-1964), an architect and politician from Zurich. He has built a lot, yet is little known. We live in a house built by him, which goes some way to explain my interest. You find more about Bickel and his projects on www.flickr.com/photos/otto_bickel_architekt/

Zwei meiner weiteren Interessen sind die Lokalgeschichte von Zürich-Hirslanden, wo ich wohne, und die Architektur von Otto Bickel-Schirmer (1894-1964), der in Zürich zahlreiche Mehrfamilenhäuser für gehobene Ansprüche, Geschäftshäuser und Villen gabaut hat. Die URL findest Du im vorangehenden Abschnitt.