Fern moves Cole & Son's long study of plant life indoors. Where Palm Jungle and Palm Leaves were drawn from the wild, this one is set in the glasshouse: potted ferns, and String of Pearls spilling from hanging macrame baskets and planters, arranged the way a plant room actually accumulates rather than the way a botanical print composes.
The drawing is illustrative and clearly done by hand. Outlines vary in weight, fronds are not quite symmetrical, and the trailing stems fall at slightly different lengths. That looseness is what keeps the pattern from reading as a repeat. The half-drop match sets each drop half a repeat below its neighbour, so the hanging baskets alternate across the width instead of forming rows, and at 64 cm the motif is large enough for the plants to be read individually. On a 0.52 m roll the drops stay manageable, which matters in the small, awkward rooms this design tends to end up in.
It is a cheerful paper without being a naive one, and it lands well in the rooms that suit greenery anyway: a garden room, a kitchen wall, a bathroom, a child's room that will not be outgrown. Painted joinery, terracotta, cane and old zinc all sit comfortably with it.
