Esteri Tomula and Botanica: tableware like a botanical field guide

A single stem in the middle of a white plate. Underneath it, in small handwriting, the Latin name.

A page from a botanical field guide, made hangable. This is Arabia's Botanica series, drawn by a decorator who spent some forty years at the factory: Esteri Tomula.

Who Esteri Tomula was

Tomula graduated from the school of applied arts in Helsinki in 1947 and joined Arabia the same year. Her title was decorator — not someone who made the shapes, but someone who painted their surfaces. She stayed until 1984.

Arabia at that time also had Birger Kaipiainen, for whom decoration was the whole point, and Ulla Procopé, who chased usable form. Tomula's work sits somewhere else entirely.

What she drew was, almost without exception, plants. Garden flowers, roadside weeds, forest berries. Nordic summers are short and the flowering season passes quickly. She spent forty years drawing it, as though reluctant to let it go.

Botanica: a field guide for the wall

Botanica is a series of wall plates made between 1978 and 1989. There are more than thirty motifs, followed by Rosa with its roses and a further group of forest berries.

What separates it from other floral ware is that the plant's name is given in Latin, in Tomula's own handwriting. Not a typeface. Actual handwriting. Look along a row of plates and you can tell one person kept at this for years.

Closer to record-keeping than to decoration. Pressing a flower between sheets of paper, writing its name, keeping it. Botanica has that quietness.

Hung on a wall they are far less demanding than you would expect. Plenty of white space, few colours; they sit naturally even in a Japanese room. Customers regularly tell us the plates assert themselves less than they had imagined.

Tomula at the table

She was not only a maker of wall pieces. She left a great deal of everyday ware too.

The spice pots are the ones we are always pleased to find: Kanel, Ingefära, Kardemumma, Nejlika. Each is painted with the plant the spice comes from. Ground into powder, these things lose their shape entirely — the pots remind you they once had leaves and flowers. Very much her way of thinking.

There is also the Pastraali serving tray with its handle, the small Fenica dishes, and the bright yellow Tanja cups and saucers. Omena, made from 1959 to 1975, takes fruit as its motif.

Collecting one at a time

A series like Botanica is not one to buy as a set.

One plant you like. Hang it a while, then another in a different season. A wall built that way looks better than a wall bought at once. Everything we stock is one of a kind, so you may not meet the same motif twice — which does make each choice count.

Tomula at Wasurenagusa

Our pieces are chosen one at a time by the shop owner at Swedish flea markets. Tomula was Finnish, but her work turns up in Swedish markets often enough. Held in the hand, you notice the faint unevenness of the white ground and how the brushstroke of the Latin name differs from plate to plate — hard to convey in a photograph, which is why product pages include close-ups where we can.