Artist who lives in Yorkshire's Himalayan Garden and Sculpture Park tells how she is inspired by her surroundings

The Himalayan Garden and Sculpture Park was founded by Roberts’ parents-in-law – Peter and Caroline Roberts who bought the privately owned 20-acre woodland garden back in 1996.

They donated it to the charitable trust The Hutts Foundation with the purpose of securing the future of the parkland so that people could continue to enjoy its collection of rare plants and the sculptures that feature in its landscape.

The garden’s patron is the actor Joanna Lumley who described the park as a “slice of paradise”

“I think that the Himalayan Garden and Sculpture Park sounds like a slice of paradise, and my Kashmiri-born heart jumps with joy to think of its existence. Gardens are the greatest healers on earth, and as our stressful anxious lives tie us up in knots we may turn to the sweet silence of the great green earth for solace. Paradise is the old word for a walled garden: safe from the burning sun and whipping winds, with water flowing, shady trees and the scent of flowers. The Hutts Foundation has generously given us the key to the door; just turn that key, and find happiness and peace.”

In the years since, the Park has been extended to cover 45 acres which includes planted woodland, three lakes and an arboretum that contains 85 striking 3-D artworks. Widely considered to hold the North’s largest collection of rhododendrons, azaleas and magnolias, the garden is home to around 20,000 plants, including over a thousand rhododendron varieties, 250 azalea varieties and 150 different magnolias. Which means that Roberts is never short of inspiration for her artwork.

“I think my best ideas come from going for walks and being outside in the gardens,” she says. “If I’m ever feeling stuck creatively, I take the dog out for a walk. And we are so lucky living where we do – it is such an extraordinary place. I had been wanting to start painting the garden from the moment we moved here.”

Roberts moved up to Yorkshire in 2015 with her husband William, who now looks after the day-to-day running of the Garden and Park established by his parents, and their young son – and the first few months were pretty busy. “We arrived in the February and I had our twin daughters in May, so it was all a bit of a whirlwind,” she says, laughing.

“But I was really excited by the prospect of living up here. My grandparents lived near Harrogate when I was growing up, so my school holidays were spent coming up to Yorkshire. And being here is wonderful – it’s an incredible place to bring up a young family. I love it.”

Not long after the move up seven years ago, Roberts also enrolled on a calligraphy and illustration correspondence course, run by the Society of Scribes and Illuminators, working from her kitchen table.

“I also went on a couple of calligraphy workshops, but other than that I am self-taught and I started to develop my own style. It was a really fun way of beginning to explore my creative side but in a structured way. And the structure of calligraphy has also influenced my painting – I tend to see lines in everything, so that I feel when I am painting it is a bit like writing script.

“Inks are the most amazing medium to work with, they can produce an intense depth of colour and translucent quality simultaneously and I now also paint using the inks from my calligraphy work.

The work on display in the exhibition is a combination of large-scale paintings of plants and flowers, as well as vibrant still lifes of brightly coloured vases filled with cut flowers, set against boldly patterned fabrics, and more detailed botanical studies of foxgloves and magnolias.

There are around 40 works in total, all of which are for sale and there is a range of styles and sizes.

“Some are smaller illustrations and sketches; others are larger scale – the biggest is a triptych of foxgloves. That is one of my favourite pieces and it was inspired by seeing the foxgloves during a walk through the arboretum. I had done a workshop with the Chelsea School of Botanical Art and with the foxgloves I was trying to capture that more formal botanical painting style – there are so many different layers and extra levels of detail.”

It has only been over the past two years that Roberts has taken up painting in earnest, alongside her calligraphy and illustration.

“I had been doing wedding and corporate work with my calligraphy and of course when lockdown happened during the pandemic in 2020 all that stopped. That is when I picked up my paint brushes again, which I hadn’t done since my school days when I studied A level Art. During lockdown, I wanted to have a lovely creative distraction and I really haven’t stopped painting since then. I started posting on Instagram which got a bit of traction, and it just grew from there.”

Then Tennants, who had been following Roberts on Instagram, got in touch and asked her if she might be interested in an exhibition.

“It felt like a big step, very exciting but terrifying at the same time,” says Roberts. “I met with them at the beginning of this year and have spent the time since painting the garden, plants and flowers through the seasons and building this body of work.”

It's perhaps not a surprise to hear that one of the artists Roberts most admires is Georgia O’Keeffe, the 20th century modernist American painter probably best known for her large-scale, close-up plant paintings.

“I love her work and whenever I am painting the magnolias, I am always thinking about her,” says Roberts. “And you can’t live in Yorkshire without admiring David Hockney – his landscape paintings and his use of colour is amazing. I also love Cedric Morris’s beautiful still lifes.”

All these influences and inspirations feed into Roberts’ own ever-growing body of work.

“I am constantly developing my creative practice,” she says. “I use watercolours and gouache, calligraphy inks, especially the Prussian blue which is a favourite of mine. It is a continual process; the more I look, the more there is to see. Initial simple illustrations have grown into larger botanical paintings using the colours I am drawn to. Prussian blue calligraphy inks which have become a favourite over the years, strong Indian yellow and plaster pink emulsion paints from interiors I love, and bright chalk pastels which I started experimenting with more recently.”

Sophie Roberts: Painting a Garden is at The Garden Rooms, Tennants in Leyburn until December 18. Entry to the exhibition is free and all the work is for sale. Tennantsgardenrooms.com

www.sophierobertsstudio.co.uk