This website is due for a massive overhaul, not before time. It’s done me well but things have moved on so there will be major changes before too long.

These two pieces, conversely, are backward-looking. In two ways. My botanical pieces are much influenced by the herbals and plant treatises of the medieval period and their later versions. A few people reading this may know that I designed a medieval curative garden last year for the wonderful Dilston Physic garden near Hexham, Northumberland.

One of my botanical pictures, a large quince piece, is now hanging in a garden room overlooking a newly-planted Quince Walk in a glorious Lincolnshire garden. Two more, an Aubergine and a Sage, are in a fabulous two-story conservatory. It’s nice, though unusual, to know where the work I produce eventually hangs, though when I remember I ask purchasers to send me a pic. It can be in a loo or a hall, it just gives it an afterlife in my mind to know it has a physical location.

I love the idea of mixing up text and picture, detail and overview, commentary and fact (or belief). This inevitably gives these pieces a retro feel and I enjoy doing them. But it’s important to avoid pastiche, so I’m not tempted to churn them out. That would be easy – they sell well and I have had some good commissions. I try to find an individal way to do each one – different techniques, mixing media.

So I hadn’t done many for some time – bar a couple last year which sold straight away – but my recent foray into art in the outdoors at the beautiful Sussex Prairies spurred me on to produce a few plant-based works. Here are a couple, made as a pair to the same dimensions.