29 August 2026

 I walked up to Kettles Yard with a friend today to see an exhibition 

Aptly (again), given that today was my botanist mother's 100th, it was an exploration of flower painting over the last century, titled Handpicked.

Not just pretty pictures of flowers, it was interestingly curated, going from Rousseau, via a range of global 20th century artists, to a young queer painter in 2026, and the stories behind the flowers were as varied as the artists.

These were a very few that caught my eye.

Cedric Morris, 1935

Gigi Ettedgui, As It Falls, 2025

Euan Uglow, Narcissus on yellow background, 1978

And this I loved - borrowed from the Scott Polar Museum, painted during an expedition to Spitsbergen in 1930 (my mother would have been 4 years old at the time) it documented Arctic flowers - the most northerly flowering plants in the world -

We talked over coffee in the friendly Kettles Yard café, passing St Peter's church on the way out -

Walking back through town there were more flowers, this time a whole mass of them attached to the perimeter railings of Trinity -

- wilting or dead from the heat and following rain storms -

tributes to Jason Arday, which stopped me in my tracks with sadness and hopeless rage.