For a long time now I’ve been taking photographs of seasonal, garden-grown flowers alongside my work as a cut flower gardener and designer. This summer I finally set the time aside to have a collection of them produced as fine art prints at various scales, something I’ve wanted to do for several years. I’m thrilled that the prints have been so enthusiastically received, and wanted to take a moment today to reflect on how it all came about, and explain a little more about the relationship between growing cut flowers and photographing them.
Back in 2014, I’d just started working as the cut flower gardener at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire and was looking for a way to document the flowers we were harvesting each week. The main purpose of this was to help make plans for the following year, to ensure that the resident florists had a good succession of flowers to use in their work. I tried spreadsheets but they weren’t really for me, so I found it easier to gather up a selection of flowers each Friday, lay them side-by side and take a quick snap with my phone camera. Soon however, I was grouping them together into particular colour ranges, sizes, shapes etc. and selecting combinations that complemented each other. Before long this routine of documenting flowers had also evolved into an enjoyable (slightly obsessive) creative outlet. It felt important to not only be involved in the practical work of gardening and producing crops, but to also take time to look closely at what was growing in the garden each week and appreciate all the amazing varieties.
I’d take the photographs at home in the living room, with natural light coming in from a large window on the left. When Laika was a young pup, my partner at the time would take her for a walk, giving me about 40 minutes to get the flowers set out and photographed before she came back and enthusiastically ran over the lot. As she got a little more obedient she’d often lay just outside the frame, sometimes offering a nose or paw to the composition and I had more time to spend on the photographs. These first years of cut flower gardening coincided with a nation-wide and world-wide surge of interest in growing seasonal flowers. Many like-minded souls were posting images and information about the plants they were growing on Instagram, & so I began sharing my photographs on a weekly basis, along with the names of everything pictured. This is why I like to send out a list of flower names with every print - because it’s always been part of the reason why I take the picture in the first place.
At the very end of 2019 I moved to Washington state in the USA where I spent about two years working on the Floret Flower Farm. I continued with my photography during this time and it was exciting to have a whole new range of plants to get to know. Many of the compositions from my time at Floret are fuller and more tightly packed than those in my previous photographs; this is as much a reflection of wanting to include as many varieties as possible as it is a stylistic choice. I actually ruined quite a few pictures by trying to squeeze too many varieties in.
In most of the photographs I like to incorporate something from beyond the garden boundaries such as a few leaves, seed-heads or lichen gathered from a walk in a nearby woodland or forest. I like the images to be a reflection of a particular moment in the year, and incorporating something, however small, from a more natural landscape makes a difference to the atmosphere of the picture (at least for me). Something as simple as the slightly translucent quality of the brand new beech leaf says something of that particular moment in spring when the trees are just coming into leaf. I also love to pick out flowers and other botanical elements which share similar colours. For example the colour of the pollen, just visible in the catkins used in March No.1 (below left) and March No.2 (below right), pick up on the same tones in the underside of a leaf, the lichen, and in the centre of a hellebore - have a look at the pictures below and hopefully you’ll be able to see what I mean. This is the detail that I really love! (Anyone else??)
When I returned to England just over a year ago now, a lot in my life had changed, and whilst it felt largely positive, I was faced with the challenge of going through ALL of my life’s possessions… a garage full of them. Several weeks last winter were spent sorting, organising and reducing my belongings, and among a pile of old paperwork work I found two large envelopes bulging with prints of the flower photographs I’d taken before leaving. They were vivid and enlivening and each one brought clear memories of the specific day it was taken; where the flowers were gathered from, and what was happening in my life at that time. They felt joyful and gave me the nudge I needed to finally do what I’d wanted to do for a long time, and start making them into a collection of prints. This year has been unusual for me in that it’s the first time that I haven’t had a garden, fixed employment or even a specific house keeping me in one spot. I’ve stayed in various places around the country, working on the design of new cutting gardens, but this summer presented an opportunity to bring this particular creative project to fruition. I moved back to Sheffield in July and started to work with a local printer to produce a selection of nine images on beautiful archival papers. And so here they finally are and I’m bowled over by the response they have already received. It’s a genuine honour for me to know that people are now enjoying these pictures in their homes, throughout Britain and all over the world! I intend to make more prints available in the year ahead, and if all goes according to plan I’ll also start a new garden soon which will provide a whole new selection of plants and flowers for future work. Fingers crossed I’ll have more news to share about this soon!
