Get to know me

I'm Tracy, the artist and maker behind The Flowering Path.

I work from a studio in the Lincolnshire countryside, making cyanotype prints and bespoke commissions from the flowers, foliage and hedgerow finds of the British landscape. Every piece begins with something real. A stem from the garden, a wedding bouquet, a posy from a christening, a handful of cow parsley from the lane outside.

Cyanotype is one of the oldest forms of photographic printing, and I came to it after reading about Anna Atkins — the English botanist who, in 1843, became the first person ever to illustrate a book with photographs, all of them cyanotypes of British botanicals. It captures the exact shape and spirit of a real flower, in deep painterly blue, and holds it there permanently. A wedding bouquet, a garden in full summer, or a single rose from someone you love.

I've always made things, and photography has been the way I've looked at the world for as long as I can remember. But there came a point when I wanted to do more than capture flowers through a lens. I wanted to bring them directly into the work, to make something with my hands that the gardens and hedgerows of Lincolnshire had a real share in. Cyanotype gave me all of it. The slow process, the deep blue, the way a real flower presses its exact shape onto paper. Photography still plays its part, and the two crafts sit nicely alongside each other.

I also work in garden and flower photography. The slow, patient looking that comes from sitting with a single bloom in early light, or catching the way frost holds onto a seed head in November. It's a quieter craft, and it feeds everything else I do. A few of these images find their way into the shop as fine art prints, and occasionally into commissioned work for gardens, growers and homeowners who want their own flowers captured in this way.

Nothing in the studio is mass-produced. Everything is made slowly, by hand, one piece at a time.

If you have a bouquet, a garden, or a place that means something to you, I'd love to hear about it.

Tracy