The Botanic Garden

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.

Meridian branded tableware)

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. (Pictured left Botanic Garden publicity shot)

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.
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