The History of Botanic Garden

Inspiration

The creation of Botanic Garden was almost accidental! By the early 1970's, Susan Williams-Ellis was looking for new ideas as Totem, the design which had been the company's mainstay throughout the 1960's, had been so widely copied and was starting to look a little tired. Susan had also been working on another design, Meridian. This was an undecorated tableware range with double raised ridges top and bottom. It was finished in either brown, terracotta, yellow or grey semi-matt glazes with oxide specks.

However, due to some technical problems experienced with the regularity of the specks, the design was relatively short lived. Susan decided to bear the Meridian shape in mind for a future project, perhaps in a regular white with the inner bands removed to suit some sort of surface decoration.

Susan had had the idea for 'Botanic Garden' in the back of her mind for quite a few years, but suddenly, two things brought matters to a head. British transfer printers at that date did not possess the technology necessary to reproduce realistic, high quality artwork. For this reason, during the 1960's, Susan always had to produce simplified or abstract designs for her pottery decorations. However, in 1970 I a representative of a German printer offered to proof one or two of her sketches, and when the results came in, she was amazed to find every detail of her colour and brush work faithfully reproduced. Susan was obviously excited about the whole, spectrum of possibilities this now opened up.

A few months later she went to visit an antiquarian bookseller in London, called 'Weldon & Wesley'. She was looking for eighteenth century engravings of sea creatures to use in a pottery decoration. She bought some French encyclopaedias but as she was leaving, the bookseller showed ! her a brightly hand coloured 'herbal' book of 1817, illustrated with a large selection of plants and flowers. The book was called 'The Universal -or -Botanical, Medical and Agricultural Dictionary' by Thomas Green.

The first page that caught Susan's eye was the vivid orange African Daisy. As she continued to look through the book, it occurred to her that rather than choosing this one flower as the basis for her next design, she should use them all, so that each plate, cup and bowl would be different.

She remembered how much she had admired her grandmother's eggshell porcelain coffee set, where each piece was a different colour. Susan was also an antiques enthusiast and very much liked the early nineteenth century dessert sets produced by companies such as Chelsea and Derby, where each dish was hand painted with a different flower. Remembering the German printer and the adapted Meridian shapes on her workbench, Susan decided to buy the book for £50 (which seemed like a tremendous amount of money at the time) and use it as the basis of a new multi-motif floral design.

Susan's idea of using these books as the basis of her new design was revolutionary. No one in the ceramic world had brought out a pattern using a variety of floral motifs for many years.

The first book she purchased, Green's 'Herbal' (otherwise known as 'The Universal'), provided Susan with a number of motifs but she needed more material and therefore began to hunt through the London antiquarian booksellers' shops. The second book she purchased, 'The Moral of Flowers', dated 1835, was destined to have a fundamental influence on the new pattern.

This particular copy of 'The Moral of Flowers' was inscribed 'To Julia'; it had originally been a gift from Julia's brother on 24th February 1835 - doubtless a birthday present. Such books were very popular. A polite interest in flowers and botany was considered suitable and attractive in young ladies at that time, and a great many elegantly illustrated books were produced as Christmas and birthday presents, or as tokens of affection. These were often called 'Tea Table Books' and filled the role of today's 'Coffee Table' books, as a source of conversation with guests after dinner or when visitors called.

The author of 'The Moral of Flowers' was later revealed as a Mrs. Hey. She put together her own poems and a good deal of prose and verse with literary and moral reflections on forty eight different plants from oak trees to daisies. To sweeten the pill she, or the publisher, had obtained the help of a highly regarded draughtsman, Mr. William Clarke, who had formerly worked for the prestigious Horticultural Society (today the Royal Horticultural Society). William Clarke's twenty four beautifully coloured and delicately engraved plates provided Susan with eight motifs for her new pattern.

Development

As Botanic Garden developed, new motifs were introduced, (as noted already), and for these Susan sought new flowers. After seeing how much people liked all CIark's pictures, she purchased more volumes illustrated by him. Two such were Morris's 'Flora Conspicua' and three volumes of 'Medical Botany' by Stephenson and Churchill. From these came five flowers such as the 'Peony' and the 'Christmas Rose'. We have not been able to find out much about William Clark, but he may well have died during the publication of 'Medical Botany' which was issued in monthly parts. In the early parts, Clark's work is often featured, but there are none of his illustrations in the later volumes.

The crocus and snowdrop motif (pictured right) came from an 1830's text called 'The Romance of Nature' illustrated by Louisa Twamley. At 27, she was a successful writer and illustrator and published a number of books. Her career in botanical illustration, however, was cut short when in 1839 she married and emigrated to Tasmania.

Design

As Susan collected her material she was thinking how to present the floral images as a design. She decided to add one or two butterflies, moths or other suitable insects to each motif to improve the fit on the pottery shapes and add more variety. She found various antique books on butterflies and insects. Susan then found a small triple leaf from a page of leaf forms, she repeated the leaf, end to end, to create the now famous 'Botanic Garden' border which is now part of the Company logo.

Then came the name. The only solution, she thought, was to call it Botanic Garden, because only in a botanic garden could the presence of such a mixed collection of plants and insects from so many different climates be accounted for, and she would also be left free to add whatever other flowers or butterflies she might fancy in the future. She also remembered Erasmus Darwin's long poem called 'The Botanic Garden'. Erasmus was Charles Darwin's grandfather, and was devoted, as was Charles Darwin, to natural history. However, whereas Charles Darwin collected facts to prove the theory of evolution, his grandfather very much took it for granted, as indeed had quite a few scholars since the sixteenth century. Erasmus was a successful physician and spent much of his time producing enormously long poems of scientific and technical subjects, such as 'The Loves of the Plants' and 'The Botanic Garden' with facts clearly described in somewhat classical language. They are still remembered by a few today, including Susan, but certainly not read.