In award-winning British landscape designer Sean A. Pritchard’s new book, he shows how he uses a riotous abundance of blooms throughout each season to create “a dreamland of color and expression” both indoors and out.
Midsummer brings a bounty of foxgloves, which “don’t stay perfectly upright like a delphinium, but their informality is precisely what makes them feel so at home in a cottage,” says Pritchard. He likes how they appear to be illuminated when placed by a window, and lets the towering blossoms softly graze the ceiling.
SEAN A. PRITCHARDTechnicolor chaos happily abounds in the way that Sean Pritchard uses a patchwork of plants and flowers to bring “an intensity of life and spirit” to both his enchanting English garden and the quirky, lopsided charm of his 17th-century cottage. A graduate of the Garden Design School in Bristol, England, whose eponymous studio was founded in 2019, his recently published book Outside In: A Year of Growing and Displaying is a thoughtful how-to for emulating the way he uses his home as “a stage for the evolving melodramatic performances brought in from the garden,” he says.
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To Pritchard, ornamental kale is “as decorative as any flower in the garden.” Before using it in the kitchen, he places big bunches in vases to create “moments of leafy drama.”
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Different varieties of garden daffodils stand tall like soldiers at the ready, held precisely in place by a hidden flower frog.
SEAN A. PRITCHARD
The cheery, humble beauty of cosmos, anchored in a tureen in the kitchen, spills over with bright pink blossoms and wispy foliage.
SEAN A. PRITCHARDNasturtiums, snowdrops, and roses fill old mugs that teeter atop stacks of books or on the seats of decorative chairs; vibrant poppies, swaths of cow parsley, or stems of rainbow chard stand tall in vintage ceramic vases, almost filling the room; delicate winter irises or pansies, planted in weather-worn terra-cotta pots, adorn dressers or windowsills; and handfuls of fragrant summer lilies in enamel jugs hypnotically scent the kitchen air. Pritchard’s ethos of bringing together drama, scale, color, scent, shape, and vessel “releases a great potential for magic,” he beams. “They are little windows into the workings of my mood, mind and imagination, like signs of quiet vulnerability dotted all around the house.”
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Outside In, $40, bookshop.org
THIS ARTICLE ORIGINALLY APPEARED IN VOLUME 12 OF FREDERIC MAGAZINE. CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE!
