Botanicals.

There is a National Trust manor house near me that has a room in which I would gladly set up a writing desk and fountain my thoughts onto parchment laid paper for the rest of my life. In a grand house it does not possess any grandeur of its own… indeed it is probably the smallest room in the hall, but in my  memory the walls are lined with  watery botanicals,  exquisitely executed and displayed in all their floral loveliness, in such a way there is no wall to be seen…

Perhaps I made that room up. Sometimes we take only the essence of a room, a time or a place home with us. Sometimes a little seed of inspiration is sewn  and the rest  is just imagination creating  a space we want to exist. A place we could live in.

Whatever…. but forever after I have loved botanical drawings, paintings and best of all the kitschy overcoloured botanical images to be found in mid century gardening books, the kind it doesn’t give me heart failure to rip out and pin onto my inpsiration board, nor shove carelessly into the frame of a mirror…

Like these delightfully exuberant images from  a gorgeous  little gardening book I found at the bottom  of a very dirty suitcase called "Gardening For Children and Beginners" which tickled my green fingered fancy and speaks in the kind of plain english, lets acknowledge kids are mini people way so wonderfully peculiar to vintage kids books…

"To those of you who not only love seeing flowers but want to grow them for yourselves, I am going to try and tell about different kinds of gardens belonging to different boys and girls, in the hope that one or more of them may have something that will interest and help with your own. It is rather fun hearing what other people do or do not do, even if we do not want to do exactly the same! You will  find in gardening – as in most things- that hearing and seeing what other people do is the way to learn lots of new things, and if we add these to our own experiments we shall never be tired or bored…"

Scrumptious! Close your eyes and you  can just hear the deliciously plummy British accents can’t you?

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