Satara records something witnessed: a leopard helping her cub into a tree at Satara Camp in the Kruger. The design keeps the gesture rather than the drama, the reach of the mother and the hesitation of the cub, and everything around it is arranged to hold that moment steady. Ardmore's animals are always individuals rather than specimens, and the design turns on the fact that these two know each other.
The vegetation is highly ornamented, fans of leaves and curving trunks marked with precise stripes and scallops, which is the Ardmore manner: the plant world patterned as carefully as a painted vessel. Against that regularity the leopards' coats are drawn loose and untamed, and the contrast between ordered foliage and wild fur gives the design its tension.
Several colourways introduce a metallic or mica pass through the fur, which lifts the animals clear of the ground and adds a dreamlike quality as light moves across the wall. An 84 cm repeat on a half-drop match staggers the trees so they do not stack, and the 0.52 m roll is manageable around openings. It belongs in a room that can be lined completely: a study, a dining room, a bedroom hung to the cornice. It is a paper for a room used after dark.
