Protea Garden is an Ardmore ceramic redrawn as a wall. At the centre of the composition stands a vessel, and the chameleons that flank it are not decoration on the pot: they are its handles, curving up and away from the body in the manner Ardmore's modellers make them. The conceit sits there quietly for anyone who notices it.
Around that centre the garden grows without restraint. King protea heads open among vines and leaves, and sunbirds feed at the nectar with their wings raised in a posture nearer to heraldry than to ornithology. Everything is drawn in the hand-painted ceramic idiom, outlined, filled, then patterned within the fill, with no perspective and no shadow, so the scene stays on one plane and the eye moves across it rather than into it.
This is a design for a room that can be given over to it: a dining room, a garden room, a hall with height. It changes character considerably between its pale and its dark grounds, the darker turning the garden nocturnal. A silk version of the same design is made for interiors that want the drawing with lustre behind it. It comes from the Ardmore Jabula collection, and sits naturally with the other designs in it.
