Meet The Floral Artist-Bex Partridge
Meet the Floral Artist Bex Partridge from Botanical Tales.
I loved visiting Bex’s beautiful garden & studio a few weeks ago at the end of July on a perfect Summer’s evening. Bex lives just over the border from me in the East Devon countryside. Such a joy to photograph Bex’s world of flowers and nature. You can read more about Bex’s story below, as well as all about her new book ‘Flowers Forever’ along with the photos I took xx
View of Bex’s garden studio filled to the brim with creative projects and dried flowers.
Tell us a little about your creative journey?
I have always loved to grow and to make. Some of my earliest memories are from my childhood garden, helping my mum with the borders and the pots. And there hasn’t been a time in my life when I haven’t had some sort of creative pass time. I was lucky enough to have been sent to a creative school from the age of eleven where the emphasis was firmly on the arts and crafts and drama, something I so grateful for to this day. But somehow despite this I ended up in the corporate world, sat behind a laptop or in meeting rooms dreaming of being somewhere else. After I had my two boys, when Arlo was still a baby I began to be drawn more and more to the outside world. First through the garden and then slowly into the world of dried flowers. With Botanical Tales growing organically I was able to leave my full time job three years ago to concentrate on nurturing my creative business to its full potential.
Bex working in her garden studio surrounded by flowers.
Sunlight floods the garden studio windows.
Garden studio scenes.
Have you always dreamed of working with flowers and being immersed in nature?
I very much live in the moment so even when I was working in my office job I was very focussed on what I was doing and didn’t tend to wish the days away dreaming of something else. It is more that at some point in my life, it became unmanageable to not be outside, it was making me (and my family) too unhappy and in the end something had to give of the sake of us all. It sounds dramatic but often life changing decisions are! Now that I am way from that world, I often wonder how I managed to stick at it for so long. I am much better suited to work that takes me outside, amongst nature, moving and creating and I feel so lucky that I’m able to being doing this for a living.
Bex in her cutting garden area in front of her studio.
Flowers drying in garden the studio.
Gateway in the garden.
You live in the East Devon countryside near to the coast. What brought you to the West Country?
The pandemic changed things for many people, us included. It opened our eyes to the life we were living and really forced us to take stock of where we were. During those early days of the first lockdown when the busyness of the world stopped, as a family we began to walk and walk and walk. With no cars on the roads in our busy home town we felt like our world had opened up exponentially - despite not being able to see anything or do anything besides walking. And it was that and then the subsequent re-opening of the world that encouraged us to reassess where we were in life. We decided on a whim to visit Lyme Regis for a day to see how we felt about this part of the world and by the next week we had put our house on the market. It sounds crazy but we both felt it in our bones that this was where we should be. I have family in Cornwall and our home town is a few hours away so our loved ones feel close enough to not feel too isolated. We live at the top of a leafy green hill, surrounded by woods and fields, yet are a short 2 mile cycle down to the beach and it was this combination that really called us here.
Freshly cut flowers being hung up to dry.
On the studio table.
Cutting flowers to dry in the cutting garden.
Your beautiful new book ‘Flowers Forever” has just been published. Tell us a bit about your new book and what inspired it?
I secured the contract for my new book right at the start of the pandemic. When my world was completely different to what it is now. So the book was conceived, written, photographed and created during the pandemic years which was a real struggle but also I now believe what makes it what it is. With Flowers Forever I wanted to show people my world, the way I grow my flowers and tend to my land, the approach I take to creating my designs whether it be an abundant flower cloud or simple ethereal winter solstice display using just one plant material. I also wanted to show readers the absolute beauty of the natural world and how it is ours to be celebrated in way that extends beyond the seasons that pass by our windows. The book covers my approach to gardening, a lot about sustainability and the importance of it when working with dried flowers, how to work with colour, texture and form with everlastings. The middle section is dedicated to all the knowledge I have gathered about drying flowers and seedheads and grasses with tips on when to pick and how to dry and supported with stunning ID shots by Laura Edwards. The last section of the book is dedicated to inspirational projects for readers to learn from and be inspired by.
Bex’s beautiful new book- ‘Flowers Forever’.
Floral scenes in the garden studio.
Bex’s newly published book-’Flowers Forever’.
Summer garden scenes.
What do you love most about your garden?
Oh goodness! All of it. It’s so hard to pick one thing to be honest. But I would probably say the wildness of the space. Even though I am growing many flowers to dry, I always do so through the lens of the natural world and how it will benefit from my planting. So to walk out into the garden on a warm summers day morning and see the space exploding with nectar thirsty insects and butterflies fills my heart with joy. We have a pond packed full of newts and toads that help to keep my slug population down, a family of grass snakes nesting in our compost heap and more birds than I can count who call our garden their home. Its this that I love the most.
Bex has turned a large part of her garden over to wildflowers.
How did you plan your garden space?
I’m not a very good planner. Even when it comes to gardening! You won’t find picture perfect borders in my garden and I will often plant something that is short behind something that is very tall, which invariably means a lot of shifting around. Besides my growing space which is where I grow my annuals for cutting and drying, I mainly focus on creating scenes that can be admired from inside the house. We are lucky enough to have triple aspect windows in all our rooms so the idea is that I can look out on my garden and enjoy the flowers even if its a damp dull day. My plant selection tends to be perennials that will see me through to late Autumn, I tend to shy away from traditional cottage garden plants and focus on those that stay in flower for a long time such as Michaelmas daisies, rudbeckia, salvias and lots more. The seedheads of these plants can then be left to overwinter, bringing year round interest for us and hiding places for insects.
What do you love most about your garden studio?
My garden studio is a place of magic and beauty. Its been in use for many years, previously as a pottery studio and you can feel the soul in the space as soon as you step in to it. With big wide windows on either side of the cabin, the way the light falls and shifts throughout the year is wonderful and I love to observe the subtle changes as the weeks pass by. I love that I can be in my studio looking out on to the garden, watching the birds gather nesting material in the spring and my sons swinging on the swing in the summer. I am inside but I never feel like I am.
Tell us a bit about your creative process?
Whether I’m creating a wreath or an installation I always start with the place where the piece is going to live. I will visit the location of an installation before I work on it to get a sense of the space and its surroundings and if I’m working on a commission for a wreath then I will always ask my client to send me photos of the room in which it will sit.
I will then develop a mood board to help define the style of the pieces along with the tones and colours and materials that I intend to work with. When working with clients this along with words shared helps us to define the rough look of the end result.
Next I will gather the materials I want to work with, focusing on colour combinations but also and perhaps more importantly textures and structures of the materials I am selecting. I always have my eye out for the twisty stems over the dead straight ones and I love a bit of fluffy filler to soften the edges of a display.
When creating I much prefer to be on my own, I get fully absorbed in the process and if I have too many people around me I can find it distracting and hard to get into flow.
How would you describe your style?
My style is ethereal, magical and wild and free. No designs are ever the same as the other and my work continues to evolve as I explore more and more when it comes drying flowers.
Are there garden spaces or artists that inspire you?
I love nothing more than visiting gardens - not only to draw inspiration from their plant choices or design styles but also to feel their gardens. I recently went to Hampton Court Garden Show and whilst I absolutely love the display gardens, I will always struggle with gardens where you can’t sit and be for a short while to feel the energy and magic that comes from those spaces. Because of moving here in the pandemic I haven’t yet managed to explore many of the gardens around me and I am so looking forward to doing more of that in coming years.
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