William Morris designed Flower Garden in 1879. He described it in a letter to a Georgiana Burne-Jones on 4 March 1879: ‘I am…in a whirlwind of dyeing and weaving, and…rather excited by a new piece…which looks beautiful, like a flower garden’. Morris claims to have chosen the colours to ‘suggest the beauties of inlaid metal’. They were almost certainly influenced by a display of items from Damascus he had studied in the dealer Vincent J. Robinson’s shop in London in March 1878 (see letter from WM to May Morris). The irregular shape of this fragment suggests it was used to upholster an armchair or sofa, it was purchased by the Gallery in 1940 from the Estate of Mrs Lucius Gubbins, one of Morris & Co.’s most well known customers.
