About Ling Warlow - Paper Botanist
I make wildflowers from paper. Sure, there’s the odd flirtation with roses and peonies but really, it’s all about wildflowers. The hedgerow and wayside ones. The ones you have to get down on your knees to really see. White archangels, ox-eye daisies, flax, harebells. The ones that are disappearing.
That's the work. Everything else - the commissions, the kits, the workshops, the retreats - flows from that central mission: to make people look more closely at the plants around them, before those plants are gone.
My work has been commissioned by ITV, National Museums Liverpool, and creative director Ali Mapletoft - including a collaboration with celebrity stylist Leesa Whisker. It has been exhibited at the Design Museum in London, the World Museum Liverpool and the Lady Lever Art Gallery. I am a twice-funded Arts Council England artist - recipient of a Develop Your Creative Practice award in 2022 and a project bursary in 2024. I'm based in Hoylake on the Wirral, where I work from a studio on Wood Street.
How I got here
My story starts in 1972, in a studio at Bath Academy of Art - where I spent my earliest years under the feet of my student parents. My Danish mother spoke to me in her own language. I grew up as much Scandinavian as English, which perhaps explains something about my taste for simplicity and instinct for nature.
I was always doing two things: making, and looking at flowers. At three, Father Christmas brought me my own packet of pink toilet paper so I could make snowflakes without putting the household out. By the time I was a teenager I had a wildflower identification book that I treated like a bible. I still have it (it’s still my bible).
Somehow, despite all of that, I never made it to art college. I spent a decade after graduating - English and Philosophy - doing the things you do: telesales, training, consultancy, management. I don't dismiss any of it. But it wasn't the right path. In 2005, after a difficult period in my personal life, I stopped waiting. I sought out people who could teach me, absorbed everything I could, and founded Dragonfly - a wedding stationery studio specialising in bespoke, luxury print. Letterpress, hot foiling, debossing. Seventeen years of one-off commissions, fine paper, meticulous hand finishing. Hundreds of weddings. I was good at it.
In 2008, the business took off. I also, miraculously, fell pregnant, with twins. But, what should have been a golden period wasn't entirely that. I had two babies and a business and I couldn't stop. By 2016 I was burnt out. It took nearly four years to recover.
Looking back, a significant part of what broke me was eco-anxiety - a word I didn't have at the time. Disconnection from nature and disillusionment. The realisation that even in a craft as physical and handmade as mine, plastic was everywhere and I was part of the problem. By 2019 I was starting to rebuild, thinking about how to change direction, when the pandemic arrived and cancelled everything overnight.
Lockdown gave me something I hadn't had in years: time. I started learning to make paper flowers. And very quickly, almost without realising it, I was back at the beginning - on my knees in a field, looking at wildflowers.
I understood almost immediately that this was what I was supposed to be doing.
The work now
My fine art botanicals are made entirely by hand in my Hoylake studio. I dye much of my own paper using plant and vegetable matter. Petals are individually cut and shaped, studied from the living flower. The work is slow and deliberate, rooted in close observation.
My Paper Wildflower Craftkit range brings the practice to a wider audience. Each kit is built around a specific British wildflower species, designed to help people notice and connect with plants they may rarely encounter. The kits don't use plant-dyed paper (it significantly increases cost and brings durability challenges better suited to the studio), but they carry the same intention: to make you look, look closely at the world outside your window.
I also run workshops and weekend masterclasses, work to commission, and supply wholesale.
If any of this resonates, I'd love to hear from you.