Severnista

This year my husband gifted me an art and botanical inspired wall calendar for the new year of 2025. It features twelve reprints of beautifully painted images crafted by the artist Emma B. Turner.

The theme of the selection is Richmond Park, a 2,500 acre establishment with royal designation, located west of London in the UK. The paintings are light and bright, grounded in greens with simple, rich colors and well crafted uses of white space and highlights that catch you and draw you in further.

So inspired by the paintings that I had to find out more about the artist. I quickly came across a post on The Frustrated Gardener blog, written by garden enthusiast Dan Cooper from the UK. His post features five more of Emma Turner’s paintings rich with flowing color and texture. Two of the paintings, The Jungle Garden in Spring and the G & T Garden, are of the writer’s own garden and they are stunning! All the paintings are a must see here.

Gardening, art, painting, writing (add music & dance). These weave together beautifully and naturally. They work together to tighten the bonds of the essence of beauty in life, cliche as that may sound. Inspiring and reflecting one another in so many interpretations, I am reinvigorated by this beauty that regenerates itself each time an artist brings forth something so lovely as Emma Turner’s paintings or Dan Cooper’s robust dahlias and tropical textures.

As we start the new year I think that this is what it is all for, building those bonds so that the appreciation of beauty is stronger than ever.   

With this in mind I now find it odd that we refer to the ‘preservation’ of art or the ‘preservation’ of green space, gardens or forests. How absolutely comical and corrupted is the language (or the lifestyle and which leads the other?) used to define what these things should mean to us! We should not be preserving them as if they are threatened relics to be lost, we should be building, creating and using them as if they are the lifeblood of beauty that we can not live without!

This year I encourage you to find a way to appreciate and be active in this beauty! Get a one year membership to a local botanical garden and visit often, take a garden tour road trip, pull your weeds and plan a new garden bed. Visit an art museum, admire a painted mural, or hang an art inspired wall calendar. But most of all regard this daily:

Beauty is bountiful. Beauty regenerates itself. It is happening now.