Auckland botanical artist Felicity Jones on her plant-inspired photography series
Auckland Botanical Artist Felicity Jones on Her Plant-Inspired Photography Series
An Auckland botanical artist has created a series of photographs that explores our obsession with plants.
The influence of a grandmother can never be underestimated, especially when it comes to passing on a love of gardening. For Auckland gardener and botanical artist Felicity Jones, this is certainly the case. “I’m a mad keen gardener and have loved flowers all my life really, and my mother was the same and her mother was the same.”
These green roots were the catalyst for starting a small-scale flower farm at her Grey Lynn home, where she’s been growing blooms for her bespoke floristry business, Green is the Thing, for five years. But it was thinking about her grandmother’s love of plants that recently sent Felicity down the garden path into an exploration of Aotearoa’s horticultural history. The result is Case Studies, an ongoing artistic collaboration with photographer Mark Smith.
Case Studies South
Case Studies South explores the tensions between environmental, social, and cultural needs in Central Otago and the Mackenzie Country.
“I started thinking about European women settlers who came to New Zealand,” says Felicity. “I had this image of The Piano, the Jane Campion film, and I kept thinking about these really strong women in the middle of the damp bush trying to recreate a little bit of their homeland. Of course, they had to grow vegetables for food, but they grew flowers because they wanted to.”
Continuing along this line of thought, Felicity started thinking about the odysseys many exotic plant species made. “Obviously, people brought seeds with them, but I started wondering about plants like roses or rhododendrons that are often grown as cuttings rather than from seed. How did people transport them and keep them alive on long sea voyages?”
The Wardian Case
Enter the Wardian case, the world’s first terrarium, invented in the 1830s, which revolutionized plant transportation. It was an accidental invention of physician and amateur botanist Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward, who was housing a moth chrysalis in a sealed bottle when he noticed that plants had germinated in its base. After establishing that condensation inside the bottle was providing the necessary moisture to keep the plants alive, he wondered if plants could survive on the decks of ships on long sea voyages if housed in sealed cases. In 1833 his prediction proved correct when live specimens of ferns and grass from England arrived in Sydney after a six-month sea voyage.
The case was a botanical game changer, and when a blooming primrose arrived in Melbourne in 1855 in a Wardian case, 3000 people went to see it, and a poem and painting were created in honor of the event.
Captivated by this history, Felicity decided in 2019 to make an artwork referencing the famous portable glasshouse. “I wanted to create an image of a Wardian case filled with blowsy English flowers in a New Zealand native setting.”
After a fruitless search for an original Wardian case, she borrowed a glass display cabinet from a clothing store, filled it with English-garden darlings such as roses, delphiniums, and foxgloves, and enlisted Mark to photograph it in a native bush setting in West Auckland.
Other photographs of exotic plants followed, many of them beloved weeds that have colonized the natural landscape. Then, to reference how plants were sent from the colonies to institutions like Kew Gardens, they displayed natives such as kōwhai and ferns in the case.
Case Studies South
In 2020, Felicity had plans to transport herself to London to exhibit Case Studies at the Garden Museum, but once COVID-19 put a stop to that, she and Mark decided to shoot another series of images, Case Studies South, which focuses on culturally and environmentally controversial plants in Central Otago and the Mackenzie Country.
They rented a campervan, packed a Wardian case designed by Felicity’s husband, and timed their trip to coincide with the flowering of the Russell lupins, divisive plants that are environmental weeds but loved by farmers for their nutrient-rich food for stock.
As well as photographing other notorious South Island weeds, Mark and Felicity photographed tropical plants in the Christchurch Botanic Gardens, referencing the burglary of a variegated monstera there last year. “Those images tell a story about people’s obsessions with plants through history,” says Felicity. “We had tulip mania and orchids, and at the moment there’s the trend for tropical houseplants.”
From spring through autumn, Felicity grows a range of flowers in long raised beds in her backyard flower farm. Winter provides an opportunity to tidy up and use more seedheads and foliage in her arrangements.
She’s keen to expand on this idea of obsession for a future series, as time permits. When she’s not teaching singing, she’s in her garden or working in her studio. Her explorations into botanical history recently led to TV work creating arrangements for the 1860s period drama The Luminaries. But most often she creates seasonal displays for weddings, funerals, and other events. “I love wild, organic, loose-looking arrangements but everything I make is quite considered and its own little artwork.”
View Felicity’s work at felicityjones.co.nz.
