The Flowers of William Morris

This title takes a comprehensive look at Morris’s gardens and flowers, setting out to shed new light on the life and work of this passionate yet practical individual. It looks at his childhood, his student days at Oxford before turning to his own homes and gardens such as Red House and the Abbey Works at Merton. Morris’s own words and those of his daughter May show his very personal approach to flowers and gardens and how his ideas anticipated the theories of William Robinson and Gertrude Jekyll. The final chapter takes a close look at Morris’s use of flowers in his designs. Did he draw the flowers he knew and loved or did he instinctively rely on the timeless wood engravings in old herbals? His lectures on the use of twining stem and curling tendril are a lesson to pattern-makers still.