Gavin Francis Stoneystreet

I am Gavin, or Franco to my friends. I am a cultural botanist and writer. Much of what I do circles how we live, work, and have a creative practice in a shared relationship with the botanical world, aware of the fractures and poverties of our current situation.

I lecture widely and enjoy opportunities for collaborative events. I work most often in garden heritage, in advising, curation, and conservation. I have written Heritage Garden conservation plans, including for William Morris’s Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire, where I also advise on the garden’s development. I am a freelance writer, along with my creative writing, and works for publication. My writing and multidisciplinary art seeks to engage with botany, weaving in my many interests including Art, Literature, Photography, Poetry, Japanese Arts and Gardens, the Arts & Crafts movement, Birds, Esoterica, and relationship to place.

I live in the middle of the Welsh Marches, a secret place between hills and woods. In the nearby walled medieval town, Catherine of Aragon and Prince Arthur once lived, but now the rivers and trees are our most noble residents.

I am an Edge-Walker, seeing kinship in Magpie, Fox, and Willow-Herb. I am mostly outside of things, seeking out either untrodden pathways or good coffee.

I like to swim in wild places and stare at herons who are my favourite teachers. I also love music which i talk about a lot.

My work explores the ways artists, gardeners, and creatives have tended their relationship with the botanical world across time and disciplines. In a lecture I once heard the anthropologist Tim Ingold state that as science has moved away from radical ecological awareness, the arts have moved towards it. I believe this to be true, and hold it as a central thread in my writing and research. As a result my botany practise looks towards the arts as it seeks to tend to our damaged relationship with nature. This is at the heart of my book about William Morris, and also of my PhD from the University of Bath which focused on Artists’ Gardens as places of pilgrimage and creative expression.