Ink Garden

For forty years a gardener on the Isle of Thanet kept notebooks of every plant she grew, drawn in iron-gall ink and dated by the day it flowered. The notebooks came to Gesso Art from her family last winter, and this is the first time any of the pages have been shown.

A life in forty notebooks

The drawings are exact but never stiff. Roots are drawn as carefully as petals, and a leaf eaten by a slug is drawn with the hole left in. Iron-gall ink starts black and turns brown over years, so the oldest pages are the warmest in colour.

Ink Garden shows sixty pages alongside a few pressed and cut-paper studies from the same period, so you can see the plant and the drawing of the plant side by side.

A free drawing table sits in the middle of the Print Room. Pencils and paper are on us.