I’m very happy to be able to show you the work I’m doing for beautiful Kew Gardens. This year I have designed a Kew Gardens Christmas card. It was announced on Friday 12th September but unbelievably the entire online stock sold out within one weekend. The first batch sold out in about 15 minutes! The good news is there is going to be another print run, and it will be possible to preorder the cards for delivery at the end of October. The pre-order is expected to open on Wednesday 17th September and I will confirm this and paste the link here. The cards are only available through the Kew Gardens shop. In the meantime, here are the paintings!

I started working at Kew Gardens back in Spring 2024 and over the seasons I’ve completely fallen under the spell of this magical place. These cards are inspired by Kew in Winter, which is actually my favourite season to be there because it’s incredibly quiet, with so much happening invisibly under the ground. Kew Gardens has the largest collection of living plants and fungi in the whole world - it’s a place which is really epic in its ambition and global significance - but somehow it’s a very peaceful and understated place to be, and I wanted to bring this into the cards. Alongside the twinkling lights and the excitement of Christmas I wanted to paint stillness and a sense of calm and balance. There’s symmetry everywhere - in the iconic architecture, the plant life and elegant avenues of trees, and I interrupted this with some diagonals - dropped gloves, a snowy branch and always, always a plane in the sky, reminding you while you’re lost in the beauty of the natural world that you’re actually in London, and right under a flight path to Heathrow. Kew is many things at once so it’s just perfect material for a paint chart. When I was first asked to make something for them it came as a total surprise, and then I half-closed my eyes and straight away thought, “What a brilliant idea!”

The paintings are tiny - 20mm x 28mm, which is smaller than I’m used to - and they’re printed at actual size on the card. Unlike my usual way of working, which uses existing paint charts, I made this one myself from scratch. To draw the header I researched the ornate graphic design of Victorian paint charts, as it was the Victorian era when Kew Gardens became a major centre of plant study and this is strongly evident in the iconic architecture of the gardens, as well as in the ambition to classify, and therefore understand, plant life. A colour chart is in itself a classification system, so the match was just perfect. This chart felt very different to anything I’ve painted previously and it was an exciting new direction to take the work.

The print quality of the cards is absolutely sublime. They are embossed, so it feels as if the paint chips are actually sitting on the surface of the card, like a real paint chart. I was just blown away when I opened the box for the first time! A box of cards cost £18 and it contains 14 cards and envelopes.

I’m now working on a piece about all four seasons at Kew, and this will be ready in 2026. I’ve also got plans to start an international tree drawing club, inspired by my time drawing outdoors at Kew, and I’ll announce this as soon as I have a fully-formed idea! If you’d like to be the first to hear about the restock of the cards you can sign up to my mailing list below. Thank you!