Bursting with colour and wildlife, verges might one day form a national network of linear nature reserves… if spared the strimmer. Sussex artist Nessie Ramm champions the beauty of the roadside verge by painting wildflowers on road signs
Words: Marian Boswall Photos: James Ratchford Marian Boswall is a landscape architect and horticulturalist who specialises in regenerative landscape design. Her book Sustainable Garden was shortlisted for Garden Book of the Year 2022.
Artist Nessie Ramm has always been obsessed with plants. “My mother said I didn’t walk until I was two,” she says, “because I had to crawl to explore the garden up close.” Yet it was only after a degree in natural sciences at Cambridge and an MA in fine art that a hike over the South Downs gave her work its signal focus. She was looking for wildflowers to paint in the big open fields of the Downs, but found none. Forced to walk across the A24 to get home, she discovered an abundance of cowslips on the verge – and a life’s mission.
“On that unloved, unphotographed, ungroomed bit you’re not meant to see, I found the richest biodiversity I’d seen all day,” she says. “I was just filled with the irony and the injustice of that: the way nature has been pushed to the boundaries; that we use the prime land for ourselves and nature is banished to the bits we don’t value. I just thought this is not good enough, and I had to do something.”
Nessie painted plants for her MA, but even then wanted to show something more than pretty flowers put in a vase, so she painted a lawn in close up, with all the jungly, tangleand-scramble of things that happen at a tiny scale and that we’re not aware of if we don’t look closely. She painted wild plants in pavements in the city, and after moving to Sussex she began a campaign to regenerate her local verges with neighbour Helen Yemm.
POINTING IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION
As a Christian, Nessie thinks the church, as an institution, could do more to promote biodiversity on its land. She feels a strong gratitude for the Earth we have inherited and is driven to give back to the local community. In fact, it was as a litter picker for her local parish that she had her biggest find. Nessie had begun painting on metal for its translucency and the jewel-like quality it lends the paint. So when she found a discarded road sign littering a verge, she didn’t take it to the tip with the rest of the rubbish, but decided to
