Woodvale Orchard is reimagined from a Cole & Son block print still housed in the archive today, and the subject is an orchard at the height of summer: plumose parrots among a flourishing canopy of leaves, with bunches of sun-ripened grapes hanging through it. It is exotic in the way eighteenth and nineteenth-century English design was exotic, with birds and fruit that never grew together anywhere arranged as though they always had.
It is surface printed, which is worth knowing because it explains how the paper looks. Surface printing lays colour from a roller in a single pass, leaving the slight ridging, the softened edge and the faint variation in density that traditional printing produces, and Cole & Son have kept those mark-making textures rather than cleaning them out. The result is a modern reproduction that still carries the evidence of how it was made.
The density of the design means it works best across a whole room rather than on one wall, since the foliage needs to meet in the corners for the effect to close. It belongs in a dining room, a drawing room, a hall or a principal bedroom in a house with some height, and it sits well with mahogany, gilt, worn rugs and lamplight. It is a paper for rooms used in the evening.
