#1. Childhood

Plants always had my interest. Together with my dad I spend precious time in our little vegetable and flower garden. I dried the flowers in my very first herbarium.

My dad past away when I was 12 and so my herbarium became my little remembering garden of him.

#2. Fashion Academy 

The vegetable garden made me want to continue this path and I enrolled at the agricultural school.  After the first year I felt this was not the place to be and I switched to the fashion academy. I preferred painted and printed plants above growing them. From this point onwards I started to build my collection of floral prints and books with floral art.

#3. Textile designer

During my work as a textile designer I visited India several times. First as a designer for a European brand, later as a freelance designer for an Indian textile factory. The factory was well equiped with a weaving and a printing mill with an 8 meter bed for screenprinting - a Valhalla!

#4. India

Next to this, In India cremation is more common than burials. Talking about death is an open conversation. Cremation is even happening on an open fire near the river Ganges. After seeing this I was inspired and became interested in what people in the Netherlands do with the urn after a loved one died and got cremated.

#5. Fortress

During my research I came across an abonded fortress for which the owners were looking for a new plan. They liked my idea to use the fortress to remember a loved one by placing the urn inside the fortress.

Together with friends we re-styled the building  with many dried flowers and art of plants. Here I started to organize my first expositions about flowers, plants, heritage and solace.

#6. Mini museum

After leaving the fortress I realized that I really love making exhibitions, but I couldn't find an attractive place so I developed a mini-museum. For exhibitions about birds and flowers I dived deep into the archives of musea and botanical gardens and found very attractive botanical art. Everytime I discovered a new botanic artwork I was amazed and thought - more people should see this!

#7. Mini exhibition

The Minimuseum was meant for public spaces but covid game into the world. During covid I started printing several botanic artworks at one size. With this prints I started making mini exhibitions on the wall for people at home.

#8. Tableaus

My friends responded very enthusiastically and called them tableaus. They encouraged me to continue composing more botanical art tableaus. For me this is such a great way to show my botanic treasures to people and share the stories of the artists who made them.

#9. Rich Heritage

The word 'Rich Heritage' came to my mind because our botanical heritage is rich of craftmanship, rich of colours, rich of forms, rich of stories and rich of knowledge. 

To share botanical artworks is to enrich your home, enrich your life and enrich the bond between humans and plants all over the world!

I hope you will enjoy Rich Heritage!