Project: The Family Beds

Client: Alison Turnbull/
Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, University of Oxford

Date: April 2005

Designer: James Goggin
Design Assistance: Nadine Rinderer

Following on from our 2002 collaboration ‘Spring Snow’, British artist Alison Turnbull invited me to work with her ‘The Family Beds’. After a series of visits to botanic gardens in Padua, Leiden, Oxford, Paris and Uppsala, Alison learnt of a recent significant scientific update to the ways families of flowering plants are classified. The University of Oxford Botanic Garden is one of the first botanic gardens in the world to completely rearrange their plant (or ‘family’) beds in line with this new genetic research.

The result is an artist's book which also happens to work as a functioning guide to the family beds in the Botanic Garden. Many European gardens, Oxford included, published pocket-sized guides in the 17th Century. ‘The Family Beds’ is a modern-day equivalent, with plant lists, space for notes and a tipped-in abstract garden plan based on a painting by Turnbull, in lieu of the traditional fold-out engraved garden plans found in the older volumes.

Bound in a screenprinted dark green PVC cover, the book is printed on nine different coloured paper sections, each corresponding with a particular plant family. Sandwiching the colours are essays and an index on off-white book wove with a colour key and the aforementioned fold-out plan on one-sided gloss Astralux.