The Jewel Box Garden

Raincoast 2004

Thomas Hobbs had a specific vision for his book: to reflect the “garden as a jewel box full of beautiful plant treasures”, intimate and precious. He talked about Bvlgari and Tiffany’s. His idea of “jewel box” introduced a number of possibilities, resolved by using a 5th-colour, metallic silver, as a cool background from which all the photographs would glow.

Hobbs’ writes in a series of musings and inspirations, so instead of treating the text as a continuous narrative, each page had a single theme, complete in itself. Readers could dip in, absorb, look at the photographs, dip into text again. The text pages are always white and spare contrasting the spreads of photographs. The hope was that in flipping through the book, the photographic pages would separate out from the text pages in a rhythm of vibrant colour, silver and white.