The Bird in the Hedge: On the Dunnock and the Making of Larkspur

There is a bird that lives in nearly every English garden, hedgerow and churchyard, and yet remains almost entirely unremarked upon. It has no bright plumage to announce itself, no dramatic call to carry across a valley, no place in the folklore reserved for the robin or the swallow. It is the dunnock, and its very ordinariness is, in its way, the reason we chose to give it a wallpaper of its own.

Prunella modularis, to give the dunnock its proper name, is a small bird, greyish about the head and breast, its back and wings mottled brown, streaked in a manner that allows it to disappear entirely into leaf litter and hedge-bottom shadow the moment it chooses to. It was once known widely as the hedge sparrow, though it is no sparrow at all, belonging instead to the accentors, a family with only one native representative in Britain. This is, perhaps, part of its quiet appeal. It does not announce a lineage. It simply gets on with the business of living close to the ground, in the tangled understorey of hedgerows and shrubberies, where it shuffles and forages with a low, mouse-like gait that sets it apart from birds that hop.

To find a dunnock, one must generally look down rather than up. It favours the base of a hedge, the thicker cover of a shrub border, the overlooked margins of a garden where bramble and ivy are left to grow as they please. It is not a bird drawn to bird tables laden with seed in the way a great tit or chaffinch might be; it prefers instead to work quietly through the debris beneath, turning over leaves in search of insects and spiders, at its most active in the still hours of early morning, when gardens belong briefly to their wild residents before the household wakes.

Its song, too, asks to be listened for rather than simply heard. A thin, high, warbling phrase, delivered from a low perch, easily lost beneath the more insistent calls of blackbird or wren. Birdwatchers have long noted that the dunnock's presence is often confirmed only by this modest, persistent piece of song, sung from within the hedge itself rather than from any prominent vantage point. There is something instructive in this, in a bird content to make itself known through sound rather than spectacle, to be present without demanding attention.

It was this quality, more than any other, that shaped the making of Dunnock in Larkspur. The Birdsong Collection as a whole is concerned with the birds that make their homes in the fabric of the English garden and hedgerow, but the dunnock in particular asked for a different kind of treatment than the collection's more visible companions. Where another bird might sit boldly against its ground, calling attention to itself, the dunnock needed to be found, the way it is found in life: settled quietly among branches, part of the pattern of hedgerow growth rather than separate from it.

The blossom that surrounds the birds in this design was drawn with the loose, unstudied branching of hedgerow shrubs in flower, white and the palest blush pink against soft green leaf, the kind of blossom that appears along field boundaries and cottage garden edges in the weeks before the true business of summer begins. It is a moment rather than a season entirely fixed: that pause in spring when the hedgerows are heavy with flower and the birds within them are at their busiest, feeding young or gathering material, moving low and largely unseen through the growth.

The colourway takes its name, Larkspur, from the soft slate-blue that forms the ground of the design, a shade closer to an overcast morning sky than to any single flower, though it shares something of that plant's cool, considered blue. It is a colour intended to recede rather than assert, to allow the branching pattern and its two resident dunnocks to hold their own quiet presence without insistence. In a bedroom, it lends itself particularly well to the stillness of early hours, before curtains are drawn back and the room, like the garden beyond it, begins its day.

There is a long tradition, in British design, of looking to the hedgerow and the garden margin for inspiration, from the pattern-makers of the nineteenth century who found as much interest in bramble and briar as in cultivated bloom, to the naturalists who spent whole seasons recording the modest lives of birds too easily overlooked. Dunnock in Larkspur belongs to that tradition. It does not ask to be the loudest pattern in a room, any more than the dunnock asks to be the loudest bird in a garden. It simply asks to be looked at closely, and, in time, to become as familiar and as easily loved as the hedge outside the window, where, if one pauses long enough on a quiet morning, the dunnocks are almost certainly there.