Picture Profile 2406: Galanthus “Oliver Wyatt’s Green”.

Artist Code 2406. Galanthus “Oliver Wyatt’s Green”. Water colour on Aquarelle Arches 100% cotton paper 140lb. 10″ x 14″. Completed 10th March 2024

This is snowdrop number eleven in a series of thirteen paintings of snowdrops for the Iceni Botanical Artists’ Fullers Mill Project, most with a special link to East Anglia. All the project snowdrops are situated in Fullers Mill Garden, West Stow, Suffolk.

FLOWERS FEBRUARY, MARCH, APRIL
Flowering relatively late in the season, this snowdrop has chubby flowers with a dark green inner mark which covers three quarters of the inner segment. The Fullers Mill plants were very few and the painting shows two years of flowering. Other snowdrops in the series mostly have two leaves and one flower; this variety seemed to have two leaves for some flowers, but several for others. Some of the leaves were quite fat with “frilly” edges and curled over at the tip, others were pencil thin. This is a very pretty snowdrop and I should imagine looks grand in large flowering clumps. The first year (2023), three flowers grew; in 2024 there were four. The top section of the painting shows both years’ growth. The flower stems were also different in that they were almost flat with outside ridges. The stem itself was much wider at the bottom than the top and in some case slightly twisted.

Galanthus “Oliver Wyatt’s Green” (No. 11)

In January 2022, the Iceni Botanical Artists, IBA (of which I am a member, and Chair from November 2021–), decided that their next botanical project would be to paint a year of the flora and fauna in Fullers Mill Garden, West Stow, Suffolk, designed and planted by Bernard Tickner and his wife, Bess. It was decided that it should be a two-year project and completion of all artworks was set for 1st January 2024.

In March 2022, Annie Delbridge, then head gardener (with permission from the Charity Perennial who now look after the garden) supplied the IBA with a list of plants which grow in the garden and the animals, birds, insects, fish etc., which live in or visit the garden. Iceni Artists have been free to choose which plants, vistas and fauna they would like to depict and it is hoped that we will hold an exhibition of all the artworks, as well as publishing a book with a selection of paintings.

My main task for the project is to paint 13 snowdrops – some rare, some not so, and others which are different, and most with a connection to East Anglia.