Fleur Olby: Plant Portraits Review

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Fleur Olby: Plant Portraits ReviewBetween 1996 and 2002, Fleur Olby illustrated all the articles I wrote for The Observer Magazine. Where her work is at it's very best, and where she stands out from any other plant photographer, is where the plant drifts away in it's abstraction. Invariably people would compliment me by saying my page 'looked' fantastic - and invariably it did because Fleur and the designer had made it so. Fleur, the editor and I would draw up a list of topics to cover over the coming month and we would work independently of each other, she taking the pictures and I writing the words. The first time I swathe pictures taken to accompany the piece was when I bought my copy of The Observer on a Sunday morning. It was a delight and a surprise.
Fleur has just published a collection of plant portraits called simply and aptly 'Fleur'. Quite a few of these pictures first appeared in The Observer, though there are plenty that I have not seen before, and this is the first time I have looked at her work without any connection to my own words. I can see now that I shackled her to the page.
Fleur's flowers often fall like watercolour onto the page, almost slipping away from their outline. The garden is left far behind and the pictures are more akin to looking down the lens of a microscope than swishing through a border. These are plants out of time and place, and locked into their own perpetual strangeness which, of course, they have always had, but which you had failed to notice in among all the gardening.
I am looking at a lisianthus, twisted twisted like a shell. Then there's a bearded iris (also purple - Fleur does purple especially well) whose petals loom, almost sinister, behind the beard that is caught in a patch of light. This small part of the flower - hardly more than a botanical marker in the garden - becomes the spotlit focus of the image and you realise you have never really looked at an iris at all.
I think my favourite picture is of a salvia which, at first glance, is almost a sketch or an impression caught in the wonderful, intense, pale-sky blue. It is not until you look closer and see the tiny hairs all up the plant that you realise this dreamy abstraction has been observed with the exactitude of a rare lepidopterous specimen.
Turn the page and there is a picture titled 'Red Rose Thorns'. These are the blood red thorns of Rosa sericea pteracantha, whose small flowers, born in late April, are white. The thorns are at their most translucently shocking on new growth, so one tends to prune it back in early spring to encourage vigorous new stems.
The downside of this is that the flower buds are formed from the previous seasons wood, so spring pruning removes them. In other words, you sacrifice the flowers for the thorns. To see the thorns - which is the reason I grow this fantastic rose - looking like this in my garden, they must be backlit, so it means looking at them in the evening. So these crimson flanges invariably come packaged with a low sun, weariness at the end of the day, the other familiar plants that accompany this particular bush, and even the cattle in the field the other side of the hedge. Fleur has ruthlessly excluded all of that and taken the plant back to the absolute essence, with it's vicious cleanness of line and shock of colour. It is just it's astonishing self with no history, no future and absolutely no horticulture, pinned to the page.
Monty Don. The Observer Magazine.16th October 2005.
Fleur Olby: Plant Portraits OverviewFleur Olby photographs plants and flowers in beautiful and intricate detail, and, in the past five years more than a million posters and cards of her brilliantly hued works were sold at stores like Ikea and Habitat. This publication is the first on Olby's horticultural photography, and it depicts not merely plants and flowers but a career that has flourished over the years.

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