Flowers in William Morris Designs: A Botanical Guide

Three Fabrics, Three Flower Gardens: The Documented Examples

Any discussion of flowers in Morris designs needs a fixed evidence base, and the clearest one available is a set of three furnishing fabrics held by the Victoria and Albert Museum. Each has a museum number, a designer attribution to William Morris for Morris & Co., a date, and a recorded printing or weaving technique. That combination makes them usable for botanical reading in a way that unprovenanced patterns are not.

The oldest of the three is Flower Garden. The V&A records it as a furnishing fabric designed by William Morris for Morris & Co., dated 1879, and identifies it as a Jacquard-woven silk and wool furnishing fabric from Great Britain, under museum number O15294. The next two are printed cottons. Bird and Anemone, museum number O78906, is dated 1882, and Strawberry Thief, museum number O78889, is dated 1883.

The records also fix the appearance of each fabric. According to the V&A, Bird and Anemone is a cotton furnishing fabric printed with birds amongst flowers and leaves in white on a red ground. Strawberry Thief is indigo-discharged and block-printed cotton, with birds, strawberries and flowers in brown, yellow and shades of green, blue and red on a dark blue ground. The table below sets the three objects side by side.

Two points in this table matter for everything that follows. First, only two of the three designs carry a flower name that the record itself supports: the anemones of Bird and Anemone and the strawberries of Strawberry Thief. Second, Flower Garden has a flower name but no recorded species, which is a reminder that the title of a design and the identification of its plants are two separate questions.

'Flower Garden' in Morris's Own Words

Morris wrote this on 4 March 1879 about Flower Garden, and the comparison he chose is telling: the design looked to him, in his own phrase, like a flower garden. The V&A notes that he was in the middle of dyeing and weaving work when he wrote it, so the remark records his own excitement about a piece coming off the loom rather than a considered description of its plants. It is worth pausing on that. The most vivid botanical image Morris attached to any of these three fabrics is not a list of species but a single overall impression, offered in passing, in a letter about work in progress.

He also said something specific about the colour. According to the V&A record, Morris claimed to have chosen the colours of Flower Garden with a particular effect in mind, and his own words are worth reading in full.

That is a striking thing to say about a design called Flower Garden, and it matters here because it shows Morris thinking about colour in terms of a craft tradition rather than in botanical terms. The name of the design points at a garden; the maker's own explanation points at metalwork. A botanical guide that only followed the name would miss what the maker actually said.

The colours themselves are recorded. The V&A describes the Flower Garden pattern as light blue, yellow and mauve on a dark green background. It also offers an interpretation of where that palette came from: the museum states that the colours were almost certainly influenced by a display of items from Damascus that Morris had studied in a dealer's shop in London in 1878.

That reading is the museum's, not a botanical claim, and it should be held alongside Morris's own account of inlaid metal. Both point the same way: whatever flowers the pattern shows, the design's documented meaning for its maker lay in colour and craft, not in the naming of plants. The sample itself entered the V&A in 1919, when the silk cost 19/6d, or 97.5p, according to the museum's record.

The object record also fixes the basics that any botanical discussion should start from. The V&A holds Flower Garden as a furnishing fabric, museum number O15294, designed by William Morris for Morris & Co. It is dated 1879 and is a Jacquard-woven silk and wool furnishing fabric from Great Britain. Those facts matter because technique is not neutral: a woven silk and wool carries flowers differently from a printed cotton, and the record's description of the weave is part of what a reader is actually looking at.

So the Flower Garden entry in a botanical guide is short, and honestly so. A name, a date, a technique, a palette, two quotations and one museum interpretation. Everything else that is often said about the design's flowers would have to come from somewhere other than the object record, and this guide does not supply it.

Strawberries and Thrushes: A Design Rooted in a Real Garden

Strawberry Thief is the clearest case in which the flowers of a Morris design trace back to a documented place. According to the V&A, Morris based the pattern and its name on thrushes which frequently stole strawberries in the kitchen garden of Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire. Here the botanical content is not inferred: the strawberries in the pattern correspond to strawberries the gardener actually lost to birds.

The record fixes the object precisely. The V&A holds the fabric under museum number O78889, dates it to 1883 and identifies it as a furnishing fabric designed by William Morris for Morris & Co. It is indigo-discharged and block-printed cotton, with birds, strawberries and flowers in brown, yellow and shades of green, blue and red on a dark blue ground.

For anyone reading the design botanically, this is the pattern to start with. The fruit is named, the bird is named, and the garden that produced both is named. If you want to follow that garden further, our guide to the Kelmscott Manor garden looks at the planting behind the designs in more detail.

The V&A also records the design's standing. It describes Strawberry Thief as one of Morris's best-known designs and as one of the most expensive printed furnishings available from Morris & Co., yet a firm favourite with clients. Cost, in other words, did not put buyers off a pattern drawn from stolen fruit in an Oxfordshire kitchen garden.

Anemones and the Indigo-Discharge Story

Bird and Anemone is the flower design in this trio that was shaped most directly by technique. The V&A holds it under museum number O78906 as a furnishing fabric designed by William Morris for Morris & Co., dated 1882: a cotton printed with birds amongst flowers and leaves in white on a red ground. The flower in the title, the anemone, is named in the museum's description of the pattern itself.

The design has an unusual double life. According to the V&A, Bird and Anemone is one of the few repeating patterns used by William Morris (1834 to 1896) for both textiles and wallpapers. For a botanical reader, that means the same flowering stem can be studied in two different materials from the same workshop.

The V&A places the design within a deliberate programme. It records that Bird and Anemone was one of three monochrome patterns designed by Morris to be printed by the indigo-discharge method, a technique that had preoccupied him since 1875. In indigo discharge the pattern is produced by removing a dark indigo ground, which is why the motif reads as white on a strong colour.

The museum's record also gives the timeline. According to the V&A, experiments using indigo for these designs started in April 1881 at Morris's workshop in Queen Square, London, and were successfully printed after he moved into his factory at Merton Abbey, Wimbledon, in June the same year. The flowers of Bird and Anemone, in other words, belong to the first year of Morris & Co.'s capability at the new works.

One detail of the surviving example adds a final layer. The V&A states that its example of Bird and Anemone was surface printed later in madder, a natural red plant dye. The red ground behind the white flowers is itself botanical, a colour drawn from a plant, even though the record describes the flowers of the pattern only as flowers and anemones.

What the Records Do Not Tell Us

An honest botanical guide has to mark its limits, and there are several. The dating of Bird and Anemone is one. The Victoria and Albert Museum's primary date for the fabric, museum number O78906, is 1882, while the same record places the experiments that led to it earlier: the museum states that experiments using indigo for these designs started in April 1881 at Morris's workshop in Queen Square, London, and were successfully printed after he moved into his factory at Merton Abbey, Wimbledon, in June the same year. Readers should hold both dates in mind when they see the design assigned a single year.

Beyond that dating question, the supplied records leave four gaps that a botanical reading should respect:

• No supplied source identifies the specific flowers shown in Flower Garden, beyond the design's name, or in Bird and Anemone and Strawberry Thief beyond the anemones and strawberries named in the records.
• No supplied source records Morris's own general statements about flowers or botanical sources in his designs, other than the two Flower Garden quotations above.
• The museum record excerpts for Bird and Anemone and Strawberry Thief are cut off, so the dating evidence from marks and labels, and the details of Morris's first attempts at indigo discharge, are not available here.
• No supplied source shows any of these examples being disputed by other institutions, and none gives fuller roles for the people involved beyond Morris as designer, Morris & Co. as producer and Philip Webb's unrelated architectural work.

The dating point deserves a little more space, because it is the kind of detail that gets flattened in most retellings. The V&A's account of the indigo work gives a sequence: experiments at Queen Square from April 1881, a move to Merton Abbey in June 1881, and successful printing after that move. The fabric's recorded date of 1882 sits at the end of that sequence, not at its beginning. A reader who meets Bird and Anemone only as an 1882 design misses the year of experiment and relocation that the same museum record describes behind it.

These gaps have a practical consequence. If a source tells you that a leaf in a Morris pattern is a specific wildflower, check whether the object record says so. In the three designs covered here, it usually does not, and speculation fills the space faster than documentation does.

Reading Flowers Across the Designs

Taken together, the three fabrics suggest a method rather than a list. Start by identifying the object: a museum number, a designer, a maker, a date. For the three examples here, the Victoria and Albert Museum holds Flower Garden (museum number O15294), Strawberry Thief (museum number O78889) and Bird and Anemone (museum number O78906), each recorded as a furnishing fabric designed by William Morris for Morris & Co. Then name the technique, because technique shaped what the flowers look like, from the woven silks and wools of Flower Garden to the indigo discharge of Bird and Anemone. Only then quote the maker, and only what he actually said.

The method pays off in different ways for each design. For Strawberry Thief it recovers a real garden and its visiting birds: the V&A records that Morris based the pattern and its name on thrushes which frequently stole strawberries in the kitchen garden of Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire. For Flower Garden it reveals a designer thinking about inlaid metal and Damascus colours rather than botany. For Bird and Anemone it shows a flower motif carried across both textiles and wallpapers, one of the few Morris repeating patterns used in both, according to the V&A.

The technique step is worth spelling out, because the three records describe three different ways of putting flowers on cloth. Flower Garden is a Jacquard-woven silk and wool. Strawberry Thief is indigo-discharged and block-printed cotton, with birds, strawberries and flowers in brown, yellow and shades of green, blue and red on a dark blue ground. Bird and Anemone is a printed cotton with birds amongst flowers and leaves in white on a red ground, and the V&A notes that its example was surface printed later in madder, a natural red plant dye. The same flower motif would not look the same, or survive the same details, across those three processes.

It also shows where to resist interpretation. Assigning plant names the records do not support, or reading symbolism no one has documented, turns documentation into decoration. If the question is how accurate Morris's plants really are, the story of wildflowers in Morris takes that up directly, and our guide to foliage in Morris patterns covers the leaves and scrolls that frame the flowers discussed here.

For a wider view of the workshop's output, the main Morris guide sets these three fabrics alongside eleven other designs. The three treated here remain the ones where flowers can be discussed from object records and, in one case, from Morris's own words.