Description
Your chance to purchase a Badminton Editions Botanical Print Tea Towel.
Printed with the Geranium from Volume II of the 1st Duchess of Beaufort’s florilegium.
In 1703, Mary Somerset, first Duchess of Beaufort, commissioned Everard Kik, a Dutch botanical artist, to create a series of paintings. These showcased the extraordinary variety of plants she had grown from seeds sent to her from all over the world. They later bound the final collection of 178 paintings into a two-volume album, a “florilegium.” Badminton House holds the album, where Mary lived and grew many of her plants.
Captioned ‘African Geranium’, this is actually a pelargonium, although they are often given the common name ‘geranium’. Native to South Africa, this is one of the many African plants that the duchess would have acquired from the Cape of Good Hope via her links to botanists in the Netherlands (the Cape of Good Hope was a Dutch colony at this time, so plants from there arrived in England via Holland). This pelargonium bears some resemblance to the ‘Milfield Gem’ the Hybrid Ivy Pelargonium that grows all over the walls of the conservatories at Badminton.
Size: 47.5cm width x 69cm length
100% cotton botanical print tea towel
Made in England
