When I first mentioned to Emma at Hamilton Gardens that I had always wanted to create a tea towel for the gardens, I didn't expect her to say, “Go on then, show us some ideas”. But she did, and that was the beginning of a year-long journey that ended last Wednesday in the most lovely, quiet way: a small gathering with members of Friends of Hamilton Gardens and the Hamilton Gardens team, gathered around a retail display of something that didn't exist twelve months ago.
The tea towel is the first ever created for Hamilton Gardens, and I can tell you that the scale of that did not escape me for a single moment.
Hamilton Gardens is not one garden. It has more than 18 extraordinary enclosed gardens across five themed collections: Fantasy, Paradise, Productive, Cultivar, and Landscape, each one a carefully realised world of its own, connected by meandering paths and doorways that take you from a Japanese Garden of Contemplation to a Surrealist Garden to an Ancient Egyptian Garden, often within the space of a few minutes' walk. To attempt to distil that onto a single piece of linen felt, genuinely impossible at times.
I tried a literal map. Too busy. I tried splitting the design across two gardens. Didn't feel right. I kept returning to the old photos I had taken over the years - because Hamilton and I go back a long way. I attended high school here in the 1980s, and later spent eight years living in the city as a young mother, visiting the gardens regularly with my children as they grew. Hamilton Gardens was a constant in those years. A refuge. A place of wonder. Many times, I would say to myself, thank goodness for the Hamilton Gardens.
So in the end, I approached the design the way I approach the gardens themselves - not as something to be mapped, but as something that is felt. Each of the 18 garden rooms is represented by a single motif, a distilled impression rather than a literal explanation, and green paths weave between them all, guiding the eye just as the real paths guide your feet. The drawings were made with watercolour, a first for me, being primarily a print artist, and the final version only truly clicked into place with a last-minute change to the background colour, almost at the end.
Throughout the process, I worked closely with the team at Hamilton Gardens, and I'm grateful for every conversation. The artwork itself was created as a gift to the gardens, an offering from someone who has loved this place for a long time. What I didn't anticipate was that it would become the beginning of something larger.
That quiet launch last Wednesday was the reveal of a beautiful new retail display: the tea towels alongside themed scented candles, and jams and preserves made from the Kitchen Garden. It felt considered and special, and entirely in keeping with the spirit of the place.
What's also grown from this collaboration is something I find genuinely exciting. Hamilton Gardens is committed to building a higher quality gift offering for their visitors, and I'm now working with them to extend that - bringing in work from other artists, printed on my custom organic cotton and linen fabric. It's an alignment of values as much as anything else: beautiful things, made well, that carry meaning.
For a place built on the idea that gardens reflect humanity's relationship with beauty across five thousand years of history, it feels right that the gifts people take home should carry a little of that weight too.
This has been a year in the making. Despite the production delays and personal challenges, it was absolutely worth it.
This tea towel is available to purchase at the Hamilton Gardens Visitor Centre Gift Shop.
For more information on visiting the Hamilton Gardens, click the link here.
