The Making of Clover

Clover and daisies scattered through a summer meadow, visited by foraging bees, form a familiar image of the British countryside. It is one that St Jude’s co-founder Angie Lewin returned to for her Clover fabric and wallpaper.

Clover can seem a modest plant, but its form rewards close attention. White and red clover, the two most common species, take their Latin name, Trifolium, from their three-part leaves, and each leaflet carries a pale marking – a crescent on white clover, a V on red. The rounded flower heads are clusters of tiny blooms, each a miniature version of the flowers found throughout the pea family, from sweet peas to laburnum. It is these details that Angie’s design draws upon.

The design has its origins in a small wood engraving Angie made in 2014 for Save the Bees, an exhibition and auction held in London to raise funds for the protection of honey bees and other pollinators. Timed to coincide with the city’s honey harvest, it brought together more than thirty artists and illustrators, among them Clare Melinsky, Katie Scott, Sanna Annukka and Anthony Burrill, each contributing an original work.

Angie later cut the image again at a larger scale as a linocut, and it was from this print that we originated the Clover fabric and wallpaper.

Some years ago, Period Living magazine sent photographer Jeremy Phillips to Angie’s former home in Edinburgh to document how the design came about. A selection of his photographs appears below, alongside studio images of the finished fabric and wallpaper.

Clover also has a chapter of its own in The Book of Wildflowers, Angie’s second collaboration with the writer Christopher Stocks, in which her botanical paintings and prints accompany Chris’s accounts of each plant’s natural history. Recalling childhood searches for four-leaf clovers, Chris observes that “we say clover as if it’s a single plant”, when Britain alone has around thirty species. Among them is subterranean clover, which turns its seedheads downwards after flowering and presses them into the soil.

Angie’s series of books with Christopher Stocks can be found on her website, and her full range of designs is in our Angie Lewin fabric and wallpaper collection.