Flopping loosely in wet heaps on the beach, seaweed is actually elegant and colourful – when you see it in the right light. Rosie Morris profiles two West Country printmakers who capture the magic of this ethereal marine foliage
Rosanna Morris is a freelance writer and editor who lives in Somerset. When she’s not writing, she is usually gardening, painting or adventuring outdoors.
Walk along the beach at Lyme Regis in Dorset and there, swirling in the tiny pits of watery sand or tethered and draped on a rock, will be seaweeds large and small, strands glistening salty and wet or frizzling in the sun.
The UK has more than 650 species of seaweed, many found on the rocky shores of the south-west of the country. And yet, despite this abundance and diversity, these incredible underwater plants have barely attracted the attention they deserve. Until recently. Thanks to Melanie Molesworth and Julia Bird, we are appreciating their beauty with the fervour of Victorian naturalists and so, too, their environmental value.
A couple of streets behind the seafront at Lyme Regis is Melanie and Julia’s shop, Molesworth & Bird, full to the rafters with artworks and souvenirs made using seaweed pressings. Fronds splayed out on cards and prints, their blades beautifully arranged, are captured in deep reds, browns and greens but also unexpected bright pinks and purples. Berry wart cress, with its intricate branches; sea oak, which looks like something gathered from a tree; and coral-like, almost ghostly, fan weed.
OCEAN FOLIAGE
“When you think of seaweed you think of thick, leathery, smelly wracks along the shoreline at low tide, but there are so many interesting little bits of seaweed around,” says Julia. “It’s the foliage of the ocean. It’s the equivalent of what we have on land but we don’t really think of it.”
Melanie and Julia opened their shop three years ago after starting their business several years before. Friends since their 20s, they both worked in London as photographic stylists for magazines and were forever collecting props for shoots and foraging for natural objects, such as shells and pebbles. Melanie found a folder of Victorian seaweed pressings in a shop on London’s Kensington Church Street one day. On moving to Dorset 10 years ago, she realised that many of the seaweeds in her antique herbarium had been collected within a few miles of Lyme Regis. Julia, who now lives in Polruan in Cornwall and swims in the sea daily, started ga
