During our last two years in London, with travel limitations and a new baby, I spent inordinately long periods of time in our garden. It was communal and ran the full length of the back of the mansion block we lived in in Battersea. It was open to all residents but our ground floor flat had a French window enabling ready access to this hidden slice of green that bisected the Victorian blocks to either side. The restrictions that came into place, both pandemic and (for us with a new baby) domestic, made this messy idyll all the more precious. The garden gave us a fortuitous freedom and relief, more acutely realised when we were all but imprisoned in our urban surroundings.

Our communal garden in Battersea

My husband is a collector and a cuttings man and a sentimental one at that and the part of the garden immediately outside our door is a potted living record of plants from people we’ve known, places we have been, walked, lived, from our wedding tables, from a church fete, a run down Wandsworth Town terrace while I had a solo lockdown postnatal appointment, friends, family, living and no longer. However unruly, it’s a record, a collection and it’s biographical.

The Concise British Flora in Colour and its author and illustrator, William Keble Martin

I’d read William Keble Martin’s autobiography ‘Over the Hills’ (sadly out of print but purchased for a song on eBay) at the beginning of the year having cherished ‘The Concise British Flora’ since my biologist godmother made me a present of it as a teenager. His wonderful draftsmanship and inexhaustible devotion to the record I have always found staggering and his biography provides a vivid insight into his Victorian childhood and the places and events that prompted his love of botany. Reading the book reignited and invigorated my love for his illustrations and this, and the long days spent sometimes exclusively in our own botanical patch, prompted my focus towards our plants and those of our neighbours and I decided to record them. Not all, I’m no Keble Martin, but some.

16th century embroidered slips of botanical design in the V&A’s collection

The format for the group came from a set of 16th century embroidered slips of botanical design in the V&A’s collection. The slips were designed as small embroideries to be sewn by any number of individuals. Once completed they would have been attached to cloth of a richer fabric and formed a single, large piece with these smaller embroideries making up the design. The idea that each plant is given the same space and importance, creating a pattern appeals very much to me as a textile designer and particularly as Keble Martin’s illustrations, while botanically accurate, have to discard disparities of size between species as a necessity in order to fit them to the page. I decided to make each of my drawings the same size as one another, squeezing a clematis to fit the same frame as a buttercup, giving each equal weight in the set, making a design of the group. Who knows maybe one day I might embroider them!

Loganberry, Nasturtium and Buttercup paintings

Japanese Anenome, Rock Rose and Geranium paintings

This then is a small illustrated botanical record of a particular time in our lives where I looked at our plants a lot and tried to get my children to learn their names but not to pick or eat them. Although we have no loganberries left. They did eat all of them.

The Rowley Gallery on Kensington Church Street in London

These painting were exhibited at the Rowley Gallery in August 2022.

Shortly after I gave birth to my first child, interior designers Turner Pocock contacted me about a commission for a Georgian country house project they were working on. Their client had requested some original wallpaper and fabric designs for the interiors and had apparently admired my existing designs. In the fog of early motherhood I was slightly reluctant to commit to the project but Bunny and Emma were patient and persevered and the two designs we now carry as part of our main collection, Mill Pond and Mill Oak, were the result.

Initial sketch and sampling for Mill Oak

Printing Mill Oak at the factory. Photography: Atelier Behm

The house in question sits in some very beautiful countryside and the owners wanted the fabrics and papers I was commissioned to design to reflect it’s bucolic surroundings. In the grounds there was a walled garden and a mill pond and beyond that a stage set backdrop of enormous oak trees. The brief was simple and I was largely left to my own devices. It was a wonderful way to work. Once the rough idea was agreed I worked the artwork up to a fully repeating design and then we worked closely together at the printing stage as the colours had to to fit to the designer’s scheme. After the house had been completed I recoloured the designs and they joined my permanent collection. (There is a House & Garden article about the Turner Pocock project here if you would like to read about it in greater detail. You will spot a smattering of some of my other designs throughout the house.)

The project for which the design was originally commissioned. Click on the image to read more.

Mill Oak, clearly, took its inspiration from those surrounding oak trees. When I am at the early stages of a design I will quite often look to illustrate a specific narrative and it is often a particular a piece of writing or story that will inspire the resulting design but the oak has a very strong, if less tangible, existing narrative all of its own. Its height, longevity, strength and prevalence across the British Isles have meant it’s long been inextricably woven throughout our folklore and history and the recognisable shape of its leaves and acorns lend itself beautifully to creating a pattern. The resulting design, I hope, celebrates this quintessential symbol of British heritage with a playful interwoven bower of branches, leaves and acorns. I wanted it to feel like lying on your back, in the summer, in the shade and gazing up into one of those beautiful old trees. A very obvious but hopefully successful attempt to bring the outside in.

Our Mill Oak paper Calamine left and Common Blue right

Mill Oak is available as a fabric and a wallpaper.

There are some plants that evoke a sense of place or, more personally, a moment in time so strongly that when encountered somewhere else, serve to carry you back there. A hot house tomato and the smell of the stem is the raised concrete patio of my grandmother’s garden in Devon, Eucalyptus is driving through a Cretan avenue, an enormous flaking branch in the back that Marc had pulled into our hire car just to get a better whiff. Sage is the Dordogne and cooking fish on a wire barbecue however many times we’ve cooked with it since. Loganberry is my childhood garden and pulling the long berries off the enormous bush that grew in the sunlight of our high walled garden. The same sunlight that never made it inside the house. And there are some more common, widely shared, because they are so specific to the environment in which they grow that they seem to represent it whenever they are found elsewhere, the thick clusters of small leaves of an olive tree, the soaring dark green streak of a cypress, the English oak, the Giant Redwood, bluebells, lavender, cacti. An obvious and endless list. The fig, specifically Ficus Carica, for me falls into both categories. While it is native to the Mediterranean and is, as such, emblematic of that region it will always make me think of Greece. My husband loves a fig forage and we’ve picked and eaten figs everywhere even indeed his parents’ garden but wherever we are, even beneath the monster specimen that hung over the pavement on our old road in Battersea, those large solid green leaves, contrasting yellow veins and pale green or deep purple fruit take me to Greece.

Greek Fig (left) and one of my early watercolour sketches (right)

Again inspired by Gerald Durrell’s book ‘My Family and Other Animals’ about his childhood on the Greek island of Corfu (sorry for the repetition but this is for the sake of any newer readers) my design ‘Fig’ was born from this strong association between plant and place. It specifically depicts a passage from the book where the young Gerry rescues a wounded hoopoe that has been shot by his gun-lover brother Leslie. He nurtures it back to health and bestows her with the appropriate moniker ‘Hiawatha’ due to her elaborately feathered head. As David Attenborough has unrestingly demonstrated, nature doesn’t always play fair and, having survived Leslie’s rifle, Durrell’s pet hoopoe escapes the house one afternoon only to meet her Darwinian end in the mouth of a feral cat. My original drawings included the cat but the overall feeling of impending hoopicide forced me to reconsider its inclusion and in the end the cat was written out and the hoopoe immortalised alone in a fig tree (later aptly discovered to be a symbol of life and peace but I cannot confess this was either ironic or allegorical as I was unaware of it at the time).

Drawing for the final design that includes the (ultimately evicted) cat

I drew the design from photographs I’d taken in Greece and then worked the ripe fruit, hoopoe and the cat in later before the cat was evicted. I wanted to create a fabric that, in keeping with its inspiration, really evoked that feeling of the Mediterranean so the print was designed to be strong and clear and we used the greens and blues of Greece when colouring it. On a slightly dry, technical note: this is a two colour print but the two colours overlap in certain areas to create a third colour. For the aspiring designer this seems like a fantastic way to keep the screen printing costs in check while creating a more interesting print but the reality is that it means the two colours have to be very close in terms of tonal quality in order to be able to see the third colour. When we have tried to print one stronger than the other, the third colour, created where they sit on top of one another, is lost as the lighter colour has no impact where the overlap occurs. Printing using traditional methods is an endless learning curve but I actually often enjoy being guided by certain restraints, too much possibility can be overwhelming and it appeals to much background in illustration and working to a brief.

Fig, in colour Dawn, on the print table as photographed by Carmel King for her book ‘Made in London’

In terms of how Fig has been used: Edward Bulmer used it at Dorfold Hall and we printed a bespoke leading edge version which works beautifully, taking the visual weight out of heavy curtains but keeping interest. David Netto used it in the bedroom below in the Bahamas with a commitment that I’m very inspired by. Anna Standish also took it somewhere particularly apt when she decorated this house in Menorca and nothing gave me greater pleasure than when designers Yellow London used it in Corfu when they designed the bedroom at the bottom of this post. Possibly the most satisfying full circle I could have wished for!

Fig in Agni in David Netto’s project (left) and in Cypress in Menorca by Anna Standish (right)

Back in Corfu in Dove on a headboard by designers, Yellow London