Janie Crow: I love botanical drawings and so a few years ago I purchased a fabulous book from Kew Gardens with the most wonderful illustrations. There is a page within the book that features sunflowers, hellebores and opium poppy seed heads and it made me think of the fields of sunflowers we walked through on a lovely french holiday a few years ago.
I have always loved sunflowers with all of their connotations to heat and sunshine. Vincent Van Gogh, whose series of sunflower still life studies are infamous, saw these stunning flowers as asymbol of friendship and gratitude, so using them as the inspiration for a design was inevitable.​ As wild poppies are commonplace in fields of sunflowers, it was logical that this design should feature them too.