I stumbled across Angie Lewin’s work a couple of years ago. I was visiting the Botanic Gardens in Cambridge and bought a birthday card with one of her prints on from their gift shop. Ever since then I’ve been hooked!
As a garden designer and someone who loves plants for their form, texture and structure I find her work inspirational. Her prints use bold, efficient lines that capture the essence of each plant she depicts. Each element is stripped down to it’s most basic, leaving elegant lines and graphic shapes.
Having read her book ‘Plants and Places’ I was intrigued to find out that she seldom uses flowering plants. ‘I rarely draw plants in flower, but instead look at the framework of stems and the shapes of seed heads and buds’.
I feel the same could be said about our gardens in the winter. The dead stems and seed pods left over from the summer months form a structure to the garden all of it’s own. Covered in frost perennials like sea holly and grasses give the garden a strong winter presence that is quite different from earlier in the year.