Cole & Son | Scenic Flora - Gilded

Scenic Flora is drawn from vintage embroidered kimono and from the Japanese chinoiseries that reached Europe in the seventeenth century. It is composed theatrically, in receding planes, so the field of wildflowers can be read at several distances at once: as a whole landscape from across a room, as individual stems from close by.

This version is printed on mica, a mineral ground carrying a fine reflective particle through the surface. Mica does not shine so much as glow. It holds light rather than bouncing it, and the effect shifts as you move past the wall or as the day changes, so the flowers lift and settle again without the paper ever looking metallic. That behaviour makes mica a sound choice in a room with limited daylight, where a matte print would simply go flat.

It is supplied as a panel, 137 cm wide by 3.5 m high, rather than as a repeating roll, so the wall must be measured and set out first. The story behind it, Kiku gathering a wildflower each day for Sakura, is the kind of thing that survives in the drawing itself, in how carefully individual stems are picked out. A bedroom, a dining room or a stair landing gives it the distance it needs.