Cole & Son | Trees of Eden PARADISE

Paradise is the oldest word in this series. Long before the Garden of Eden borrowed it, it was a Persian term for a walled royal garden, and Martyn Lawrence Bullard's panel leans towards that reading, with lavish flora adorning the climbing tendrils, ornament laid over ornament, closer to a Persian garden carpet than to an orchard.

Like its companions it is drawn from archive chintz, the meeting of imported motifs with traditional British heritage design that produced the most highly prized textiles of the period, and like them it carries the Cole & Son wisteria and the forbidden fruit somewhere in its boughs. The finish is deliberately distressed, with a batik-like softness that keeps the colour from reading as new.

The panel measures 0.7 m by 4 m and hangs with a random match, so there is nothing to align and very little waste, a practical virtue in an old house with walls that are not plumb. It can be hung as one of three to make a continuous grove, or on its own as a single tableau, which is usually the better decision in a room that already has a strong floor or good joinery. Either way it wants low furniture in front of it and light from lamps rather than from the ceiling.