Book Launch Announcement: 12 November 2026

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Embroidered Nature

The Art Of Amanda Cobbett In The Buccleuch Collection

Published: 12 November 2026

Price: £35 hardback, 152 pages

Embroidered Nature catalogues the collection of 26 works of art commissioned by the Duke of Buccleuch in 2022, inspired by fungi and lichen discovered in four strikingly different historic landscapes linked to the family: at Bowhill, in the Scottish Borders, at Dalkeith Palace, just south of Edinburgh, at Drumlanrig Castle in Scotland’s warmer, wetter southwest, and at Boughton in Northamptonshire. In her introduction the author Natasha Goodfellow, who has long followed Amanda’s work, describes her approach and methods, and Andrew Montgomery’s astonishingly precise photographs bring her works to vivid life on the page. The book is also richly illustrated with dozens of Amanda’s own photographs and watercolours. The plates are accompanied by Natasha’s commentary and Amanda’s field notes.

‘To look at Amanda's work is to be transported deep into the heart of the forest. Tiny mushrooms spring from the stalks of decomposing leaves. Twigs and bark, both wind-fallen and living, are tufted, crusted and cushioned with mosaics of lichens and mosses of astonishing variety. Fleshy toadstools capture the eye with their bright colours and strange forms – closer inspection revealing their delicate gills, a nibbled stalk, and the mycelium threads or hyphae that both form their fruiting bodies and connect them together in networks that we are only just beginning to understand.’

Although at first glance the pieces look entirely real, they are in fact embroideries, composed of thousands of threads, painstakingly worked and reworked into their final forms.