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