Fifty Years of Botanic Garden

For a pattern that’s celebrating 50 years in production this year, Portmeirion’s Botanic Garden looks incredibly fresh and contemporary.

The collection’s delightful transfer print pattern combines flowery motifs with butterflies and insects and a three-leaf border – a theme created by Portmeirion’s co-founder Susan Williams-Ellis. Read on for the pattern’s fascinating history.

Botanic Garden is much admired for making everyday occasions special and for how it has become such a comprehensive collection. Not many patterns allow you to carry the theme through to the kitchen, and even the garden, in such a way, with beautiful motifs gracing clocks and coasters for indoor decoration and even planters, bulb pots and watering cans for enjoyment in the greenhouse.

At Chinasearch, we stock all these items or can find them with our free ‘Search for Me’ service.

Defining Moments with Botanic Garden

The Botanic Garden story

How did this timeless pattern come about?

Susan, along with her husband and Portmeirion co-founder Euan, visited an antiquarian bookseller in the early 1970s looking for sea creature illustrations to decorate pottery. While browsing, her attention turned to a horticulture book bursting with bright and detailed hand-coloured illustrations of flowers. There and then, Susan began to visualise a beautiful range of dinnerware with a different flower on each piece.

For variety across the collection – and to improve the fit of the motifs on the tableware shapes – Susan thought about adding butterflies and insects, along with the now-famous triple-leaf border. This pattern was to be named ‘Botanic Garden’ after an 18th-century poem written by botanist Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles Darwin.

A new pattern needed a new range of shapes. For this, Susan turned to the existing Meridian shape, removing all the ridges except the top one. And for all-important transfer printing, Susan sought out the skills of a German printer she’d seen the work of previously who’d amazed her with such brightness of colour and accurate reproduction of brushwork detail.

In 1972, Botanic Garden launched with 32 motifs. Fifty years on, and with the collection remaining fresh and exciting through the introduction of new flowers to replace the older motifs, more than 70 motifs now feature across tableware, cookware and gifts. Reminisce and browse the older pieces, or see what's new and still made in Stoke.

Botanic Garden – a British classic with a lovely story. How will you celebrate 50 years?