Pencil and watercolour

13 3/4 x 10 in. (35 x 25.4 cm)

John Nash was a keen plantsman. a passion he shared  which Charles Mahoney, Edward Bawden, Geoffrey Rhoades, and Evelyn Dunbar.  This group regularly swapped cuttings with each other and cultivated their favoured plants in their gardens and recorded them in paintings and drawings.  Illustrations were produced for books - Mahoney and Dunbar had published Gardeners' Choice in 1937.  English Garden Flowers, for which this is likely to be a study, illustrated by Nash, was published by Duckworth, London, in 1948.  The inclusion of the disproportionately-sized pitch fork is reminiscent of the garden tool motifs that Mahoney and Dunbar enjoyed adding to the more playful of their line illustrations.