Bamboo Forest dates from the early nineteenth century, which puts it ahead of the Victorian fashion for Orientalist decoration rather than in the middle of it. The plant carried meaning, resilience, prosperity, endurance through winter, and its arrival in European interiors was partly about that symbolism and partly about the pleasure of something entirely unlike the native flora.
The design is a grove rather than a specimen. Canes run the full height of the repeat at close intervals with the leaves filling between them, so the wall becomes a dense screen of verticals. At only 42 cm the repeat is short for a design of this height, which means the grove reads as continuous and unbroken; there is no point at which the eye catches the pattern restarting.
It is printed on a non-woven ground and hangs as a straight match on a 0.52 m roll, which keeps the canes true across widths. The short repeat also makes it economical, with little waste on standard drops. Use it where a room needs height and calm at the same time, in a bedroom, a bathroom, a passage or a garden room, and keep the furniture low and plain. The short repeat also means less waste than a design of this height usually causes.
