The gardens at the Chateau de la Bourlie in the Dordogne were laid out in the seventeenth century, and they are formal in the French manner, with terraces, clipped box and water, and planting that has grown considerably less disciplined over three hundred years. Bourlie takes the rhododendron from them, at the point of full flower, and draws it at generous scale.
The rhododendron is a difficult subject and a rewarding one. Its trusses are heavy and spherical, its leaves are broad, leathery and glossy, and the two together give a design real physical weight. Here the blooms are massed rather than isolated, so the wall carries the profusion of a shrub in season rather than a repeat of a single flower, and the leaves supply the structure that holds it all up.
This is a paper for a room that can take a full-blown floral without apology: a bedroom, a drawing room, a garden room with doors onto planting. It is at its best hung through the whole room rather than on one wall, where a design of this abundance tends to look stranded. Plain painted furniture, matting and unlined curtains keep it from tipping into excess. It is one of the few florals that genuinely improves with more of it.
