Behind the collection: Nocturne
Why we drew the plants of the Islamic garden after dark, and what each one brings to the wall.
Most garden pictures are made at noon. The light is high, the colours are full and every leaf is easy to read. Nocturne began with a different hour: the garden after the sun has gone, when the walls give back the day’s heat, the water is darker than the sky and the pale flowers are the last things you can still see.
The twenty prints in the collection are drawn in pale gold, cream and soft green on deep indigo, ink green, aubergine and black. The palette came first. We wanted pictures that sit quietly in a room in the evening, under lamplight, rather than shouting across it at midday.
The garden as a plan
The gardens of the Persian and wider Islamic world were often laid out as a chahar bagh, a fourfold garden: a long water channel crossed by a second one, dividing the ground into four beds, with a pool or pavilion where the channels meet. In a dry climate water was precious, and the garden was built around it.
Fountain shows that plan from above, an eight-pointed basin with four channels running out to the edges and petals floating on the water. It is the map for the rest of the collection. Every other print is, in a sense, one bed of that garden seen up close.
Cypress
Cypresses often lined the channels of a Persian garden, giving shade and a dark vertical line against the sky. In Persian poetry the cypress is a familiar image for the upright, graceful figure of the beloved. In Cypress and Rose the trees stand in a row with roses at their feet and a crescent above, a line of dark shapes that holds the whole sheet together.
Pomegranate
The pomegranate is named in the Quran among the produce of gardens, alongside the olive and the date palm, and again among the fruits of the gardens of paradise in Surah Ar-Rahman. It is also a rewarding thing to draw: the crowned fruit, the narrow glossy leaves, and the seeds when one fruit splits. Pomegranate shows a single branch; Pomegranate Lattice turns the fruit into an all-over repeat inside a gold ogee frame, the way it might appear on a textile.
Jasmine
The English word jasmine comes, by way of Old French, from the Persian yasamin. Common jasmine climbs walls and trellises with pairs of small leaflets and white flowers that open along each stem. In Jasmine Trail the strands fall from the top of the sheet as they would from a wall; Jasmine Stars is a small, regular repeat of single sprigs, closer to a printed cloth.
Tulip
The tulip has a particular place in Ottoman art. Its Turkish name, lale, is written in Arabic script with the same letters as the word Allah, which is often given as one reason the flower became so loved as a motif. The same four letters, rearranged, also spell hilal, the new crescent our name is taken from. We drew it twice: Lale, one slender dagger-petalled tulip inside a fine gold circle, and Specimen, a wild tulip pressed as a herbarium sheet with its bulb and roots.
A garden drawn at night is a garden reduced to what still catches the light.
Carnation and iris
When the court painters of sixteenth-century Istanbul developed what is now called the Kara Memi style, four garden flowers became its core vocabulary: the tulip, the carnation, the rose and the hyacinth. They spread from manuscripts to Iznik tiles, textiles and dishes. Carnation Sprays borrows that habit of repetition, with each spray carrying a full flower, a bud and paired leaves. Iznik Vase gathers the whole bouquet into one vessel.
The iris is the quietest of the six. It is a familiar presence in Persian and Mughal flower painting, where artists drew it with the same care they gave to portraits. Night Iris shows the plant as a botanist might: three upright standards, three falls, a fan of sword-shaped leaves and one bud still in its sheath.
Living with the collection
Because the grounds are dark, Nocturne works best where there is warm light nearby: a bedside wall, a reading corner, a dining room used mostly in the evening. The prints also sit well together as a pair or a run of three. Cypress and Rose with Rose Wall makes a calm pair for a hallway; Lale, Night Iris and Specimen make a narrow vertical column beside a doorway.
If you print at home, choose a matte paper. Deep indigo and black grounds show every fingerprint and reflection on gloss, and matte keeps the gold reading as a soft colour rather than a shine. All twenty prints are free to download in every frame ratio.