POSTCARD "THE GEOMETRY OF ORCHIDS"

CHF 5.00

PAY WITH TWINT

Salt wind arrives before anything else on these cliffs. It finds gaps in the church windows, cracks between stones, the hinge she never fixed on the greenhouse against the south transept.

Nothing else grows here. That was the rule she set for herself thirty years ago and has never once broken, not even for the roses everyone assumes a church garden needs. Orchids only. Not the kind lined up in pots on a windowsill. Hers climb. They hang from the roof beams on threads of root, gripping stone that was never meant to hold anything alive. Some wedge into the gaps where mortar has crumbled away, no bigger than a fingernail. Others sprawl the length of a transept wall, decades of growth nobody trained or trellised, left to decide its own shape.

She doesn't call it a collection. A collection implies order, implies she chose each one and placed it where she wanted it. What she has is closer to a population, thousands of plants she has mostly just allowed. An orchid seed is smaller than dust and needs almost nothing to take hold: a crack in stone, a pocket of moss, the bark of another plant. Once she understood that, she stopped potting them. She started giving them places to land. The church, with its ledges and joints and centuries of small imperfections, turned out to be exactly the kind of ruin an orchid hunts for.

No two mornings inside these walls look the same. A species that has shown nothing but leaves for six years might flower overnight above the choir stalls, and she'll only know because she happened to look up while carrying water somewhere else. She has stopped trying to track them all in a single log. There are too many, growing in too many directions, keeping their own time. Instead she moves through the building slowly, most days, scanning walls and beams the way you'd scan a crowd for one face, not expecting to find it, unwilling to be the one who wasn't looking when it finally shows itself.

Visitors sometimes ask why she never added anything else: a hedge, a tree, something to hold colour between blooms. She tells them the same thing every time.

Nothing else grows here.

PAY WITH TWINT

Salt wind arrives before anything else on these cliffs. It finds gaps in the church windows, cracks between stones, the hinge she never fixed on the greenhouse against the south transept.

Nothing else grows here. That was the rule she set for herself thirty years ago and has never once broken, not even for the roses everyone assumes a church garden needs. Orchids only. Not the kind lined up in pots on a windowsill. Hers climb. They hang from the roof beams on threads of root, gripping stone that was never meant to hold anything alive. Some wedge into the gaps where mortar has crumbled away, no bigger than a fingernail. Others sprawl the length of a transept wall, decades of growth nobody trained or trellised, left to decide its own shape.

She doesn't call it a collection. A collection implies order, implies she chose each one and placed it where she wanted it. What she has is closer to a population, thousands of plants she has mostly just allowed. An orchid seed is smaller than dust and needs almost nothing to take hold: a crack in stone, a pocket of moss, the bark of another plant. Once she understood that, she stopped potting them. She started giving them places to land. The church, with its ledges and joints and centuries of small imperfections, turned out to be exactly the kind of ruin an orchid hunts for.

No two mornings inside these walls look the same. A species that has shown nothing but leaves for six years might flower overnight above the choir stalls, and she'll only know because she happened to look up while carrying water somewhere else. She has stopped trying to track them all in a single log. There are too many, growing in too many directions, keeping their own time. Instead she moves through the building slowly, most days, scanning walls and beams the way you'd scan a crowd for one face, not expecting to find it, unwilling to be the one who wasn't looking when it finally shows itself.

Visitors sometimes ask why she never added anything else: a hedge, a tree, something to hold colour between blooms. She tells them the same thing every time.

Nothing else grows here.

DETAILS

SIZE

A6 10.5 x 14.8 cm


BACKSIDE

Blank for your message


Soft and uncoated, that welcomes ink and holds it well

PAPER


MADE IN

The UK


WRAPPING PAPER "SOMETHING ABOUT A GRID"
CHF 30.00

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In a drawer lined with faded velvet, in the basement of the natural history museum, someone once arranged the world by colour and weight. The compartments run in neat rows and columns, a grid built to hold what might otherwise scatter. Shells from the Mediterranean lie numbered, side by side. Three ceramic vessels from Athens, fourth century BC, provenance unknown, stand slightly apart from everything else, as though still waiting to be placed. A botanical drawing of Citrus aurantium, hand painted in ink and wash, Florence, 1743, its colours still true, lies flat beneath glass. Beside it, a dried citrus branch, the fruit still attached, brittle now as paper. Citrus peel, curled and hardened with age. A pressed sprig of bitter orange blossom, its petals gone the shade of old paper.

We built our own version of that drawer for "Something About a Grid," and filled it with sage and moss. A tangerine branch traces its own line across the paper. Shells curl into the corners. The grid holds them all in place, the way the drawer once did.

Long before this drawer was built, someone else kept a version of it on her desk. Maria Sibylla Merian, born in Frankfurt in 1647, learned to paint from her stepfather, a still life artist, and turned that eye toward something almost no one studied then: insects. Her studio held rows of glass jars, each one holding a caterpillar mid change, light falling across her worktable from a window she kept angled just so. Beside the jars, cuttings stood in shallow water, roots trailing pale threads beneath the surface, flowers open at every stage from bud to drop. She ground her own pigments. She mixed her own inks. And she returned to the same jar day after day, sketching each moult until the moth broke free, always beside the very plant that fed it.

Among the sketches she kept pinned above her desk, one image was said to return to her again and again, though it would not be painted for another century: a girl tying willow fronds into a bundle for Palm Sunday, headscarf burning orange against green. When Kanuty Rusiecki finally set that scene on canvas in 1844, titling it Lithuanian Girl with Palm Sunday Fronds, sage and moss and the deep shade of fern under low branches, he painted the same devotion Merian gave her insects and roots.

Maria pins the last sketch to the wall, closes the drawer of dried specimens, and turns down the lamp.

PAIRS WELL WITH

COTTON-LYOCELL WRAP "THE WHITE STORKS"
CHF 150.00

PAY WITH TWINT

Inspired by the 17th-century Indian tempera painting The Attractions of Music, this design reimagines the artwork’s meditative harmony between nature, ornament, and human expression. The white storks, borrowed from the original composition, moving through a dreamlike landscape. The birds act as keepers of stories, drifting silently through ruins, gardens, and fragments of forgotten worlds. Around them, overturned vessels, architectural remnants, celestial diagrams, pearls, fruits, and faded ornamentation appear like relics carried across centuries traces of trade, ritual, celebration, and cultural exchange dissolved into dream.

Influenced by the decorative borders and layered symbolism characteristic of Indian court paintings, the piece blends antiquity with surrealism, creating a floating world where mythology, memory, and nature coexist in delicate equilibrium. A meditation on preservation, ornament, and the poetry of collected fragments.

Made from lyocell, the fabric wrap is exceptionally soft and gentle against the skin. Its generous size allows it to drape beautifully - worn as a wrap, a shawl, or loosely over the shoulders. The fringed edges finish it simply and naturally.

WRAPPING PAPER "THE EVERGREEN TAPESTRY"
CHF 30.00

Introducing The Evergreen Tapestry wrapping paper, a beautiful blend of nature’s charm and classic artistry. Inspired by the rich history of ancient tapestries, this design brings together elements that feel both timeless and modern. Tapestries were once used to decorate castles, tell stories of historical events, and symbolise wealth and power, often commissioned by royalty and hung on the walls of grand halls.

Perfect for the fall and winter seasons, The Evergreen Tapestry lets you own a piece of this storied tradition or bring it with you to the next birthday party, turning every gift into a work of art.