The paintings are part of a series called Herbaceous Border and are simply a response to the colour and pattern found in a bed of flowering plants.

Gardening books often tell us what should be planted where, and what colours should be put next to each other, but along comes a strong breeze, a rain storm, or several ‘volunteer’ plants, to alter a careful plan and to produce and amazing, incongruent mixture.

The plants in these paintings that try to capture that unintended result, are not botanically exact but are inventions painted in the studio using the natural flow of watercolour on paper to try to capture a sensation and a memory.

My inspiration for these is my own garden, but the early influence for them comes from my many childhood visits to a museum for the decorative are called Temple Newsam run by the city of Leeds in West Yorkshire, U.K. where I was exposed, not only to decoration for its own sake, but also to the British tradition of watercolour painting.

Although these paintings are unashamedly decorative watercolour flower paintings, a tradition for women artists, I try to push the medium and the subject matter into something new and unexpected.

Margaret Wilkins