The Garden Reflected
There is an old apple tree outside my studio. At this time of year, Grecian windflowers carpet the ground beneath it, alongside daffodils and grape hyacinths. I walk past them every morning barely giving them a thought. But this week I stopped and found myself wondering what it would be like if my studio looked out onto concrete instead — and I realised, with some surprise, how profound an effect this small patch of green has on me and on everything I make. It turns out this is not a new feeling.
Garden Mural in the House of Golden Bracelets, Pompeii.
Pompeii — the need for green
In Pompeii, over two thousand years ago, people felt something very similar. The scholar Wilhelmina Jashemski discovered that there were few houses in the city with no garden at all — and that neighbours who were fortunate enough to have a large garden would sometimes cut a window in the wall between two properties so that the family next door might share the view.
That detail has stayed with me. The simple human generosity of it. The recognition that beauty is not a luxury but something closer to a necessity.
The people of Pompeii grew plants for pleasure, for medicine, for practical and symbolic reasons. The city had a thriving perfume economy, and roses were among its most valuable ingredients. And where actual gardens were too small or too seasonal, painted ones took their place — garden frescoes that lined the walls of courtyards and dining rooms, perhaps suggesting larger spaces, or conjuring the illusion of abundance through the grey months of winter.
The garden painted on the walls of the House of the Golden Bracelets is one of the most extraordinary surviving examples — dense with birds, flowers and fruit, a whole imagined landscape contained within four walls.
Sandro Botticelli Primavera tempera on panel 1470s Uffizzi Florence
Sandro Botticelli Primavera, (detail)
Botanical study of a carnation c. 1630 19 x 14 cm Gouache on paper. Howard Hodgkin Indian Collection
Botticelli — symbol and abundance
Nearly fifteen hundred years later, that same impulse — to surround ourselves with flowering abundance — finds one of its most extraordinary expressions in Botticelli's Primavera.
Painted in the 1470s and now in the Uffizi in Florence, the painting has been studied exhaustively, and scholars have identified over five hundred species of plant within it. Nothing is accidental. Each flower carries symbolic weight — the painting is an allegory of spring, depicting the transformation of the nymph Chloris into Flora, goddess of flowers, shown above in her flowing, flower-strewn gown.
Look closely at the carnations in the upper right of Flora's dress. Now look at a Mughal botanical study of a carnation made around 1630 — approximately a hundred and sixty years later, in a completely different culture, on the other side of the world. The resemblance is striking. Whether through direct influence or parallel fascination, the same flower is being observed with the same reverence. Pattern, as ever, travels.
Albrecht Durer Great Piece of Turf. Watercolour 1503
Dürer — truth to the overlooked
Thirty years after Botticelli completed Primavera, Albrecht Dürer produced a watercolour of an entirely different kind.
The Great Piece of Turf, painted in 1503, is a close study of wild plants — greater plantain, dandelions, meadow grass — recorded against an almost bare backdrop. There is no allegory here, no symbolic programme, no goddess emerging from a sea of flowers. Instead there is something quieter and, in its own way, more radical: an unerring commitment to look carefully at things that most people walk past without a second glance.
Dürer painted the Great Piece of Turf before the Reformation took hold, but there was a sensibility already growing in that era — a movement toward simplicity, directness and a more unmediated relationship with the world, one that distrusted ornament and symbol. I find myself wondering whether that sensibility is already present in this painting. Whether choosing to paint weeds — humble, overlooked, unglamorous — was itself a quiet statement. Not beauty as allegory. Beauty as it actually is, growing quietly at your feet.
John Everett Millais Ophelia (Detail) 1851-2
The Pre-Raphaelites — observation and myth
The Pre-Raphaelites, painting in Britain some three hundred and fifty years later, held both impulses simultaneously. Influenced by John Ruskin's insistence on truth to nature, they looked at plants with the same forensic attention as Dürer — and yet they remained deeply drawn to symbolic meaning and literary source.
Millais' Ophelia, painted in 1851-52, brings these two things together in a single image. Shakespeare's Ophelia, driven to madness and drowning in Hamlet, is here surrounded by plants that were identified and painted from life, each one chosen for its symbolic resonance — the willow for forsaken love, the nettle for pain, the daisy for innocence. The painting is at once a precise botanical record and a dense symbolic text.
Raqib Shaw
The Four Seasons "Spring", 2018-2019
Acrylic liner and enamel on birch wood 114 x 120 cm
Raqib Shaw — paradise lost
More recently, the British-Kashmiri artist Raqib Shaw has used flora and fauna to create images of extraordinary density and richness — verdant, jewel-like, almost overwhelming. On the surface they might read as decorative. But they are nothing of the kind. Shaw's lush imagined landscapes are rooted in longing — specifically in his own family's displacement from Kashmir, a place of extraordinary natural beauty that he can no longer call home. The abundance in these paintings is the abundance of memory and grief. The paradise here is one that has been lost.
Shaw writes about beauty and pain as inseparable — the idea that beauty without sorrow is merely decorative, that it is suffering that gives a work its gravity and compassion. I find myself thinking about that in relation to my own work. The most personal paintings I make are not comfortable. But I hope they are true.
Matt Bollinger Weeds V (Detail) Flashe acrylic on canvas
Matt Bollinger — weeds and the overlooked
And then there is Matt Bollinger, an American painter whose work could not feel more different from Shaw's at first glance. Bollinger paints everyday Middle America — people living ordinary, pressured lives, caught in the quiet moments of getting by. His figures are tender and specific, painted with a care and attention that feels like an act of respect.
Alongside these paintings and animations, Bollinger makes a separate body of work he simply calls Weeds. Close studies of the plants that grow in the cracks — in car parks, along roadsides, in the neglected margins of ordinary life.
The same plants that Dürer elevated five hundred years ago, growing in the same overlooked places, painted by an artist whose whole practice is about paying attention to what is usually passed over. There is something in that connection that feels important — and I find I am still thinking about it.