Cast Anchor

In the foothills of the Cambrian Mountains, Zuleika Melluish’s garden blooms with wildflowers and native plants. Pushing up through the soil from intentional, self-seeded roots, grasses, foxgloves, brambles, honeysuckle and cow parsley blow in the breeze, criss-crossing and collapsing on to one another, intertwined and reaching out over their beds.

It was soon after the birth of their second child that Zuleika and her husband started to look for a rural home, with the intention of splitting their time between London and the countryside. The house they found has an acre of land, surrounded by fields and hedgerows, with a near-constant breeze flowing in from a reservoir over the Welsh hills. ‘It was already an established garden, and it didn’t change much throughout the year because it had all these evergreen shrubs,’ Zuleika tells me in her dining room, which looks over the garden. When they bought the house, she didn’t know a lot about gardening, but was interested in plants and knew she wanted perennials: blooms that she could watch grow and change with the seasons.

The garden is largely left to its own devices, partly because the family’s visits are limited by the school calendar, and also because of how Zuleika has come to approach cultivating the land: in harmony and collaboration with nature. ‘I began with native, wildlife-friendly plants. They are the most interesting to me, and I think that is the purpose of this ecosystem, of creating a garden. Every time we come here, I look around the beds and there is something new and unexpected. It’s incredible.’ Poppies and thistles appear as if from nowhere, along with nettles, dog rose, teasel, buttercups and Japanese anemone. She has planted grasses – pheasant’s tail, moor and tufted hair – as well as other light diaphanous plants like meadow-rue (Thalictrum rochebrunianum), Acanthus and fennel, which dance in the breeze. The hedgerows that line the foothills are full of climbers and wildflowers, transported to the beds of her garden to mingle with repeat plantings like Buddleia, cranesbill and perennial cornflower. ‘That’s why it is such a muddle. A nice, messy muddle.’

Zuleika’s cultivation of wildflowers, and the connection to nature that nourishes, also informs (and is, in turn, informed by) her art practice, as she draws and recreates in clay the intricate structure of her plants. ‘When I am pressing flowers into clay, I try to capture the essence of how they grow in fields – or as much as you can on a flat plate, where it is restricted.’ More recently, she has started translating plants into three-dimensional sculptures using porcelain and wire, a method that allows her to really bring to life ‘all that overlapping tangledness’. The first plant she worked with was jasmine, which she had growing both at both her home in London and in Wales; she set out to build it up petal by petal. ‘I spent a lot of time looking at it and cutting it up, seeing what it is made up of and observing how it moves,’ she tells me. ‘You have to give up control and just look to the innate qualities of these plants, which have this wild nature to them.’

The artist has been drawing and making prints since she was a child, continuing to produce her work while studying English at Oxford University, through to her postgraduate degree at the Courtauld Institute of Art. She painted Persian miniatures, works on paper intended to be kept in albums or illustrated books; often, they depicted groups of people in a landscape or building rendered in bright colours, with precise detail and intricate patterns. ‘These were all very controlled, and the perspective is all off, so they’re not particularly natural,’ says Zuleika. She took up ceramics through a workshop in London, initially painting plates with balanced, symmetrical patterns, reflecting the tradition of Persian tiles, before she started to experiment with pressing plants into clay and working with porcelain.

Working with clay and porcelain requires a similar mentality to working with a garden, Zuleika feels: it’s a slow process, and no matter how much knowledge you have, or how many times you’ve done the same process before, you do not necessarily know how things are going to turn out. ‘I like the slow element in gardening – and the element of surprise,’ she tells me brightly. ‘The fact that you have to wait months or years to see what it’s going to look like. And it never finishes, really, because plants just keep going.’

When she started work on the plot, Zuleika planted herbs in raised sleeper beds – ‘thinking I would be able to control it all very nicely’. Soon after returning to London, though, she got a call from the farmer saying that the gate had been left open and sheep had eaten or trampled the whole lot. ‘I went back and replanted it all – I was determined this would not defeat me. The following summer, they had been smothered by buttercups. I realised I could not fight against it.’ This balance between determination and surrender feeds the artist’s garden as well as her works, providing the fertile ground needed for both to thrive.

As she continues to make plants in porcelain — with honeysuckle, foxgloves, and brambles planned to join the jasmine and wisteria — Zuleika reflected on the contrast between the pristine, white material and the flowers it seeks to mimic. ‘Porcelain has all these associations as being cultivated and civilised, and I think there is something fun about trying to make something natural and wild with it.’ Building up flowers in white reduces the plants down to their form alone, allowing us to appreciate the structure itself without the sensory information of colour and smell. ‘There is more space for it to be true to life by not adding colour: you can use your imagination and appreciate the beauty of it.’ When Zuleika considers her study of plants, how they grow, move and intertwine with each other, both in her garden and her sculptural work, she sees her art practice as an effort to make the ephemeral permanent: ‘I try to capture the moment in the life cycle of a plant when they are blossoming, and at their most fertile; when the bees would come to them, I suppose.’

For more information, visit zuleikamelluish.co.uk