Mahoney’s unbridled enthusiasm for plants extended to include the objects and implements found in gardens - watering cans, greenhouses, wheelbarrows & spades. It was a passion which Mahoney shared with Edward Bawden, Geoffrey Rhoades, John Nash, Evelyn Dunbar, (with whom he published Gardener’s Choice in 1937) and from 1940 onwards his wife Dorothy. The aritst’s daughter, Elizabeth Bulkeley recalled that ‘beneath the south wall of his studio my father...grew many kinds of Polygonum. Some, like P. cuspidatum, were statuesque giants, others, were delicate

and lacy’. (letter to Paul Liss, March 15, 2005)