FLOWERS FROM A LONDON GARDEN

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

This is the second instalment of our Design Stories and this month we bring you ‘Birds & Beasts’. Also part of the ‘Garden of the Gods’ collection, ‘Birds & Beasts’ is a printed menagerie of the species naturalist and writer, Gerald Durrell collects and covets during his childhood on the Greek island of Corfu.

The Durrells (Gerald, his mother, two older brothers and older sister) relocated to Corfu from South London in 1935 when Gerald was ten, staying until the outbreak of war in 1939 when they returned to England. On Corfu his existence seems to have been almost entirely out of doors and he was completely free to explore the wealth of flora and fauna (but mainly fauna) that the island provided. He writes of boating excursions with only his dog for company, long expeditions to find a particular species and hours spent “watching the private lives of creatures”. He was home-schooled by a number of his eldest brother Lawrence’s friends, one of whom Theodore Stephanides, a doctor and naturalist, encouraged and nurtured Durrell’s existing keen love of nature. It was an idyllic few years for the budding naturalist and indeed Durrell said if he could he would “give every child the gift of my childhood”.

Gerald Durrell as a child on Corfu with Roger the dog (on the left) and an owl.

Durrell’s time on Corfu prompted him to write a trilogy of autobiographical books about his time there. Named after the second of these, my design ‘Birds and Beasts’ is a zoological parade of the many birds, animals, insects, fish and sea creatures referenced, chased, acquired and collected by the young Gerald throughout the three books. His faithful dog Roger, his donkey Sally, Ulysses the owl, Achilles the tortoise, Quasimodo the pigeon and beetles from the Rose-Beetle man, blennies, dolphins, a wild boar and Alecko the seagull all feature.

It was Corfu and Durrell’s books that initially inspired the collection but a slightly later trip to Greece, this time Crete, provided a wealth of inspiration for how the design now looks. The Palace at Knossos (and home to the Labyrinth or not as seems to be the case) didn’t really light me up. It was terribly hot on the day we chose to visit and the site pretty barren, allowing the white sunlight to reflect unmercifully off the limestone and double-cook any unwitting sightseer. I struggled to enjoy much about it save the eventual sanctuary of the shade of a large Fig tree. The pseudo ruins and reproduction murals definitely did not transport me back to life in ancient Minoa. Instead, stripped of its artefacts and then gaudily rebuilt and repainted, the palace is served up with a flavour that sits somewhere between a theme-park and a school playground.

Embroidery from an antique shop in Heraklion and pots from the Archeological Museum

The capital Heraklion, however, houses the good stuff. All the personality and plunder missing from the palace is here at the Archeological Museum. By the time we got there I was, of course, particularly primed to favour it unreservedly to the oven of a ruin but I was rewarded in my bias with a hall of marbles, the transplanted frescoes from the palace and case after case of clay vessels quirkily illustrated with fish, birds and animals all enclosed in a refreshingly air-conditioned environment. The pots particularly are total design dynamite and I’ve come back to them as a reference point repeatedly long after they planted the seed of inspiration for the final feel of ‘Birds & Beasts’. It was also here, and with total delight, that I recognised the inspiration for one of Josef Frank’s fabrics, Anakreon: a large 3500 yr old fresco (again from Knossos and again somewhat defaced in its restoration) featuring a central blue bird. I felt pretty pleased to have stumbled into such solid company.

Josef Frank’s design Anakreon (above) and (below) the mural from Knossos that inspired it.

Ok postcard over. Birds and beasts sketched and assembled, I engraved each one onto scraperboard inspired by the single colour, graphic ceramic decorations we’d seen at the museum and then in an effort to get everyone into some sort of order I looked to some more recent, Greek folk embroidery to determine colours and layout. The result is a homage to Durrell and his love of animals but also ancient Minoa and those lovely painted pots despite Durrell’s well documented complete lack of interest in Greek history.

Clockwise from top left: My original illustrations, printing on the gali and the screen we use to print the fabric.

I have grown very fond of this pattern over the years (particularly since having my own children). Despite being a single colour design, it has regularly proved a complete nightmare to print due to the fine lines and has prompted the occasional but humorous reaction “I couldn’t possibly use that. I cannot stand frogs/snakes/owls etc.” so definitively not one for the fauna-phobic! Its minor drawbacks have only increased my affection for it and I always intended to use it in my children’s room. I finally committed to making them a pair of curtains over this last winter. I am no curtain-maker but they’re not looking at the pleats or the fact that the lining is very definitely too short and only just meets the turn up.

Children’s bedrooms from Natasha Mann (left) and Tom Morris (right)

A more professional finish can be seen here in these delightful children’s rooms from Natasha Mann and Tom Morris. And now we are producing it as a wallpaper I’m very much looking forward to seeing it in more rooms, children’s and otherwise, and maybe even prompting a very rewarding dip into Durrell.

‘Margo’ is our most popular print so I thought it would be a good one to kick off this series of ‘Design Stories’. My aim is that these stories take you through the thoughts and inspiration behind each design, how I translated my ideas onto paper and into a pattern, how we produced the final product and then how that product has then been used by others to tell another story. So without further ado… ‘Margo’.

During a wonderful holiday to the Greek island of Corfu I read author and zoologist Gerald Durrell’s delightfully funny, autobiographical book, My Family and Other Animals, describing his unconventional childhood there. Lying on my front on a rocky beach in the September sunshine, his evocative prose completely focused my Corfiot experience and I looked for what he vividly described: the colours, the plants and animals, sounds and smells, the temperature and textures and found pockets of the landscape and life he remembered, still there if occasionally marred by a large boat of burnt tourists or an abandoned motorbike.

Corfu, Clementines and all my Gerald Durrell books

‘Margo’ is one of a small collection of prints I designed following this trip, inspired by both my short time on Corfu and Durrell’s books and named the ‘Garden of the Gods’ after Durrell’s title, both for the island and his third book in the trilogy.

The designs themselves draw on Corfu’s flora and fauna as described by Durrell and aim to replicate the colours, atmosphere and characters (both human and otherwise) so richly expressed in his writing. The colours we’ve used in the final fabric prints reflect the Mediterranean motifs: deep, clear blues, verdant greens and bright turquoise, dusty chalk and terracotta, with a smattering of citrus and geranium (pigment name picking is pretentious but pungent: you get the idea).

My initial watercolour sketch for the design, pencil drawing and adding detail to the print layers.

An orchard of fruit and flowers, ‘Margo’ is a tribute to Margaret, the only Durrell daughter and Gerry’s teenaged sister. Life, while idyllic, seems reasonably frustrating for Margo. She is isolated from girls her own age at a time when you might look for reassurance from your contemporaries. She is primarily preoccupied (according to Gerald) with “hectic affairs of the heart”. Lurching through numerous, sentimental dilemmas, she has only a preoccupied mother and three brothers for counsel each of whom are equally absorbed in their own pursuits, pausing but briefly to ridicule (however humorously) her weight, complexion or current paramour. I designed this fabric for her. I too, blundered through my adolescence as one of only two girls (my sister being the other) at an all boys’ boarding school where my father taught. While I lacked some of Margo’s dramatic conduct and romantic impulse (possibly my parents would disagree), I can utterly empathise with her situation as she teeters on the threshold of womanhood in a faintly unusual, environment.

Photograph by Ewald Hoinkis, 1940s summer prints and Liberty & Co dress fabric 1938

This design was my first floral print. Launching off the deep end, it unashamedly celebrates flourishing femininity illustrating many of Corfu’s blooms: anemones, roses, magnolia, orange blossom and, of course, that Mediterranean classic, the geranium. There’s even a somewhat obvious moth emerging from its cocoon (as Durrell would say “just in case we missed the point”). The pattern references the bold fashion prints of the 40s that Margo may or may not have worn but I love them so it was a great excuse to research that element and get the feeling absorbed into the design.

Screen printing ‘Margo’. Two colours on the left and then four on the right

We screen print most of our designs. The process retains a wonderful depth of colour and texture and means that every run is unique (sometimes this is a blessing, sometimes I wouldn’t describe it as such). We print Margo in three colour ways, Lemon, Pink and Mandarin, on an oyster linen. The scale of the huge horizontal repeat means we will struggle to get it onto a conventional wallpaper but we will try at some point.

‘Margo’ used in interiors from Sarah Vanrenen left and Henri Fitzwilliam-Lay right

It is the absolute cherry on the cake in my job to see my fabrics and wallpapers used in other designer’s interiors and in the case of this fabric it is used very much in the spirit in which it was designed (but perhaps that always happens) in bold, playful, feminine rooms with serious character. Rather like Margo herself.

This is something I have been meaning to do for a long time and after two years of wild procrastination here it is. Perhaps now that two years have passed it is actually easier to recognise how great an impact the bursary had on my business. I'm therefore going to look on the time lapse between the event and this appallingly belated post as almost necessary. 

In 2014 I won a bursary organised by journalist Katie Treggiden. Katie is a passionate design writer and has enthusiastically championed many young designers and businesses through her blog "Confessions of a Design Geek". In 2012 she launched the COADG Bursary in order to give one young design business a leg up. The bursary included a stand at the trade show 'Home', a photo shoot and advice from a group of mentors to help with every aspect of running a start up design business from PR to stand layout. Since then the bursary has mushroomed and now includes an invaluable abundance of advice and opportunities from industry professionals. 

It's that time of year again and with the 2016 shortlist on the immediate horizon I thought it might be a apt moment to acknowledge how grateful I am to Katie and all the mentors (there is, if you haven't got it by now, a Noah's Ark of mentors) that worked with her to provide it. (If you want to apply follow the link here but you'll need to be quick as the bursary carriage turns into a pumpkin midnight on Sunday).

At the time I applied I had been in business for a year or so. Things were ticking over but I knew there were aspects of the design industry where I felt madly out of my depth (although, for the record, it has become apparent that that feeling never leaves you). I had never done a trade show, in fact barely sold to trade, and was so anxious about seeming inexperienced or unprofessional that I rarely asked for help. The bursary seemed like business manna and, as it turned out, it was.

I was short-listed with four extremely talented designers: Annabel Perrin, Keith Varney, Nancy Straughan and Taz Pollard and the voting went public. I have to say that, horrendous as this prospect was, as a previously fully subscribed PR hermit, it forced me to become more comfortable with social media and talking about my own work in a way I had never had to before. I had desperately been trying to overlook the fact that if you don't talk about your work at this stage, really, who is? I won purely by the miracle that is social media and swallowing my pride and emailing anyone I'd ever met. I wouldn't want to go through it again but I am certainly less shy about the prospect of talking to people about my work and sometimes (although I can barely admit this) even enjoy it.

The advice and support I received through the bursary was invaluable. Katie's enthusiasm for design and her optimism is infectious and the friends and mentors she had on board reflected her vision and energy. The bursary gave me the opportunity to look into every aspect of my business, build on what I already had and consider the future possibilities. I had advice on how to market my work, display it, present it and sell it. There were elements I hadn't even imagined and those that I knew I needed but hadn't been able to afford.

The bursary made my first trade show a success instead of a blundering, anxious mess and provided me with the confidence that I wasn't going to balls it up ('it' being everything in general). I learnt that feeling like you don't know what you're doing is entirely natural and that however far you get this will almost always be the case. My business is more established and professional because of the bursary. I have a clearer vision of what it is I want to achieve and how I want it to happen and without the friendly encouragement and generosity of everyone involved it would have taken me a lot longer to find my feet.  

Thank you again to Katie, Yeshen, Adam, Richard & Aaron, Jo, Patricia, Blair, David, Justyna, Daniel, Julia, Ingo, and Keith & Mark.