KEW GARDENS X STUDIO SPELLING

When I was first asked to make something for Kew Gardens it came as a total surprise, and then I half-closed my eyes and straight away thought, “What a brilliant idea!” I started working in the gardens back in Spring 2024 and over the seasons I’ve completely fallen under the spell of this magical place.

Kew Gardens became a major centre of plant study during the Victorian era, and it’s the 19th century ambition to classify, and therefore understand, plant life which made this project feel like a perfect match, as a colour chart is in itself a classification system. The constantly changing vistas, plants, seasons and skies gave me so much material to work with and I loved working outdoors.

The first piece I made was this Kew Gardens Christmas card for 2025. It was announced on Friday 12th September and unbelievably the entire online stock sold out within one weekend. The first batch sold out in about 15 minutes! It was so wonderful to think of all these cards flying through the post in December. Thank you to everyone who bought a pack!

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 design. 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.

There are also two exciting products with my Christmas design - a very large and very useful tote bag and a delicious bar of chocolate, so it’s now possible to match your cards to your bag to your snack! The tote bags are still available in the Kew shop - click on the image to head there.

I’m now working on a piece about all four seasons at Kew, and this will be released in 2026. As an extension of my work there, last September I started a four week international tree drawing club, inspired by my time drawing outdoors at Kew. It was called Universitree. Every Sunday I went outside to draw a tree and I invited anyone else to do the same. The idea was that when we draw a tree together we feel connected - to the tree, to the rhythm of the changing seasons and to each other, wherever we are. With a minimum of means I was hoping we could build up, in a time of division, a gentle community and a sense of togetherness. People from all over the world joined in - Australia, France, the US and the UK. We spanned hemispheres, time zones and seasons, which was wonderful! The variety of trees and drawing styles that came in was so inspiring, and I’m now noticing the trees around me much more than I used to. Thank you to everyone who took part! As soon as the next stage of the Kew Gardens project is ready I will send out an email to my mailing list - if you’d like to be the first to know you can sign up to the list below.