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The Kitchen Garden

This one’s for the kitchen — and the cook. A kitchen should feel as considered as any other room, so I made a set of herb prints worth hanging properly: basil, mint, parsley and rosemary, the four I actually reach for. Each comes three ways — a clean botanical plate, an old apothecary-encyclopedia page, and a modern version of the same — so you can match whatever your kitchen already is. There’s something honest about herbs as a subject: useful, unfussy, good. Hang one over the worktop and let it earn its place beside the pots and the chopping board.

Hugo North at his studio easel, painting the first Kitchen Garden piece — a watercolour botanical study of basil, a real sprig pinned up beside it for reference — Hugo with the first concept piece — the study that became the Basil Botanical Plate.

How it began

Drawn from the windowsill

This lot started in the kitchen, not the studio. I cook a fair bit, and there’s always a row of herbs on the sill in various states of neglect — basil bolting, mint taking over, rosemary going woody. I’d been collecting old botanical encyclopedias for years, those lovely hand-coloured plates, and one morning it clicked: why not the plants I actually use? So I pinned a sprig up, mixed some watercolour, and drew it properly — the honest, slightly imperfect specimen, Latin name and all.

The one on the easel is the basil — first of the set, and still my favourite. I kept the real sprig pinned beside it the whole time so I couldn’t cheat. It became the Basil Botanical Plate, and the rest of the kitchen garden followed after it, one windowsill survivor at a time.

More about Hugo →

The craft

How I work

There’s a faster way to do all of this, but where I am from you can always tell when someone takes pride in their job. I’d rather make fewer things properly than a thousand things nearly.

Hugo mixing oil paint on a well-used palette in the studio

It starts with my hands

Every piece begins as a real painting in my studio near the Peaks — brush, ink, mistakes and all. If it didn’t start by hand, it wouldn’t be mine to sign.

A fine-art giclée print of an ink-brush cat emerging from a wide-format printer in the studio

Made when you order

I don’t keep a pile of prints in a warehouse. Yours is made when you ask for it — fine-art giclée on thick 280gsm FineArt Paper or premium canvas, with inks that will outlast the both of us.

Hands fitting a finished print into a handmade oak frame on the workbench

Framed properly, here

Hand-framed in Britain by people who care about the job as much as I do. It takes a few days longer — I’d rather keep your wall waiting than let it down.

Hugo on a stool in the studio with his morning coffee

A day here is simple. Coffee first — nothing happens before that — then I open the blinds and look at yesterday’s work in the morning light, the most honest critic I know. The good hours are the quiet ones, radio on low, before the phone remembers I exist. And whatever kind of day it’s been, I clean every brush before I leave — partly respect for the tools, mostly because tomorrow’s work deserves a clean start.