Elgin Botanical Gardens c. 1936

Tabea Hosier made this watercolour drawing of Elgin Botanical Gardens, sometime in her lifetime, and wow, what a vision. I love how the drawing shows us the garden, not as a real place, but as a diagram or map. Look at how she renders the plants, especially in the lower section – they're not quite real, right? There’s a flatness to the colours, a deliberate avoidance of shading that makes them look like paper cut-outs pasted onto the page. Notice also the rendering of the path, it looks like it is made from icing! The drawing is not about realism, it’s about imagination and memory. It reminds me of the work of Emma Amos, another artist who uses flat planes of colour and pattern to create spaces that feel both familiar and dreamlike. With art there are no fixed meanings, just ongoing conversations.