A book in the making
The team
It took just over a year to produce this book. It was a time of inspiration, fun, teamwork and old-fashioned toil. The team consisted of Hilary Watson, a fellow textile designer, photographer Hans Ole Madsen, cook Ami Celerina Ciborowski, gardener Terry Johnson, editor Katie Schwarck and myself.
The plan
I began by mapping out the four main chapters according to colour, texture and mood – which is why a mood board introduces each chapter, encapsulating each season as I see it. Once the visual scheme was in place, I began planning each season. Using images of nature, interiors, recipes, snippets of history and other interesting pieces of information, my idea for the whole book was to allow nature to inspire – be it an interior decoration scheme, a seasonal dish or a gardening tip.
The process
The work was carried out in stages. First, a photo shoot of nature, either a whole landscape or perhaps a close-up of a leaf or flower. Then, with a goodly selection of beautiful images, the next stage involved developing those images into design ideas in the widest sense of the word – a hand-embroidered cushion, an autumnal dinner table or a colour scheme for a room – as well as planning for the next nature shoots. At the subsequent photo session, we photographed the designs and dishes and took a new set of nature photographs. And so the book evolved.
The places
Oxfordshire is such a beautiful county that finding a motif is not difficult. The challenge lies in the selection process. The common thread for all the locations was a sense of history and ‘weather-beaten’ charm.
The text
Writing the English text presented another challenge, or rather two: the content and the phrasing. The content, I knew, had to be different from the foreign editions (in Danish and German) as SEASONS is for a British readership who are, of course, already familiar with British traditions. Secondly, despite my twenty years in the UK, some ‘Danishisms’ have a tendency to appear at all too regular intervals. But they stood no chance in the face of scrupulous editor Katie Schwarck, who patiently weeded them out while trying valiantly to enlighten me on the semantic subtleties of the English language.
