The Emerald Sea

Barley, a dog, stands in an unreasonably lush expanse of grass that extends to the edge of the frame on all sides. Small white flowers are scattered throughout, helping to give a sense of perspective.

As much as suburbanites yearn for the lushest, dankest lawns that year-round sprinklers can buy, I think they’re far from Barley’s ideal. She’s not a fan of having so much mud between her toes that it starts to cake in, and a lawn this moist grows from soil that’s never fully dry. Laws on this scale present a further problem: With no obvious landmarks, she gets a kind of restlessness, sniffing at the ground less and less and favoring instead targets on the far horizon. In her perfect park, she’s never more than 100 feet from a tree, never more than 50 feet from a shrub. Like the cautious sailors before the Age of the Sail, she sticks close to the scented coastline, and hesitates to venture into the open ocean.