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Biography

I started the Esterni blog simply to share knowledge gained through art, travel, teaching and reading.

I wanted to encourage people to think of their gardens as a resource, to feel inspired, and to consciously take positive (stylish!) steps towards environmental stewardship. When I worked in Higher Education, (15 years), I always felt that there was huge value in the convergence and cross over of disciplines; in small steps, this is what the blog hopes to achieve.

Before Esterni I worked as a Senior Lecturer in Art and Design, teaching across Textiles, Fashion and Theory subjects, with a special emphasis on innovation and technology in the making and presenting of design collections. I loved the challenge of developing students’ creative progress, helping them to create their product and brand. At the same time, I maintained a high profile, 25-year practice as an artist in textiles (most recently shown at the Victoria and Albert Museum blockbuster exhibition, Quilts, 1700-2010), developing new methods of representing and interpreting historical and archival textiles through creative video works. The way I look at things and re-construct them to show their experience and connection through time is something deeply ingrained, and a unique quality that remains in my concept movies/design work.

In 2009 I started thinking about how to combine my love of design, knowledge of plants (more in a minute), a track record of innovation in art practice and began developing Esterni Design Partnership. I didn’t want a business to be a traditional “garden design” practice, more of a hybrid consultancy resource where my loves of textiles, gardens and design objects would eventually merge. In this I have been helped and supported by Fiona, an architect who specializes in modern period buildings and interiors, and who renders the beautiful CAD plans and 3D models that give structure to my more fanciful planting explorations…We compare modernist influences, look at architectural plants, select furniture…develop a style.

My only strategy, when I began the Esterni blog, was to try and borrow the idea of colour trends and collection style/stories from the textile world in a way that can be applied to plant communities and accessories, particularly for those undecided gardeners on enjoyable but challenging trips to garden centres. Its about trying to join up the picture of our lifestyles, and in the process to get and give inspiration to green our environment while enjoying the best color, proportion, patterns and materials brought by informed and skillful design.

I am a graduate of the Royal College of Art, London, but I was born in Florence, Italy, and lived in the country in the Maremma, in Southern Tuscany, until I went to do my first degree at Edinburgh College of Art – quite a change-. Even as I arrived there for the first time, I felt a strong affinity between the landscape I found and that which I had left behind, strong, timeless, romantic. The connection had been made at an instinctual level and offered centeredness and comfort, helping me deal with cultural displacement.  (An interesting link, Fiona is Scottish!)

The formalized structure of Italian gardens and landscapes is central to the Esterni vision of an overarching framework that connects nature and culture:

we design to make wonderful associations between modern architecture, strong, drought tolerant Mediterranean plant forms, and the mystery of green spaces.

The blog is for you: develop a new story….

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