Photo and illustration by Edward Luke Thrush.

As a part of A Dash of Lavender: Celebrating LGBTQ+ history month with Queer Botany, there will be a botanical drawing session at Chelsea Physic Garden with a focus on queerness and finding inspiration in nature. Materials will be provided but you can bring your own preferred materials if you like. This will take place indoors in the Garden’s gallery. All skill levels are welcome. This will be a slightly different approach to botanical drawing, based more in the meditative and expressive quality of drawing than a scientific approach. We will warm-up with some brief drawing exercises followed by a longer session. We will then share our work and see what others have done.  

This session will be hosted by Edward Luke Thrush (he/him), a designer, illustrator and artist based between Birmingham and London, UK.  For his personal work Edward incorporates botanical imagery in his drawings, prints and paintings, using knotted brambles and flora interlaced with litter and other elements of human interaction.  His work aims to explore the boundaries of urban and natural spaces whilst evoking issues of discovery, trespass and belonging through the queer perspective.  You can find his work on instagram at @elthrush or online at www.elthrush.com. 

For LGBTQ+ History Month Chelsea Physic Garden is collaborating with Queer Botany to look at plants and the Garden through a queer botanical lens. Queer Botany aims to share marginalised perspectives, support more diverse representations in the environment and outdoors, and affirm connections between queerness and plants.