Waxwing Woodland 98/11

 Designer: Paul Hilditch

Limited Edition: 100

Waxwings and woodland are almost synonymous, and for a very good reason.  The birds adore ripe fruit, just as much as Moorcroft has done for more than a century.  For this reason, the waxwings’ home tends to be northern forests, rich in fruit from early summer onwards (wild strawberries, mulberries and raspberries) right through to the rich pickings of late autumn, followed by winter when food supplies become less plentiful (juniper berries, grapes, crab apples, mountain ash berries and mistletoe).  If fruit grows in the wild woodland of northern Europe, waxwings will be there to eat it.

As in all Moorcroft designs destined to live on for posterity, it is necessary to pull the threads of images together and weave them into design ideas, rather like weaving a tapestry.  Certainly, waxwings are a novel feature in Moorcroft art, but fruit is not.  The designer does not rest at this point.  Instead, Paul Hilditch reminds us that crab apples have never before appeared as an integral part of a Moorcroft design.  Waxwing Woodland has changed all that.  Colourful Waxwings perch happily among crab apples, pecking their way through a veritable feast of brightly-coloured berries.  The imagery Paul has used is real.  Even the crab apples have surface blemishes so common with  wild fruit which, unfortunately, reminds me of something really bad that I once did in my youth.  To walk my dog, I had a favourite path edged, at one point, with three crab apple trees.  One of them never fruited and so, using an old Worcestershire grafting technique, I implanted on to the trunk of the original barren crab apple tree, some Coxes Orange Pippin grafts.  Nobody noticed, or even if they did, nothing was done about it.  Five years later, the tree was happily producing Coxes Orange apples, now eaten by human waxwings, also out walking their dogs in the autumn.  It is this curious memory which will steer me towards a Waxwing Woodland vase for our home collection of Moorcroft.  Others among you all will soon recognise the same design style in Waxwing Woodland which Paul Hilditch used so successfully in the 2011 Little Shop.  The two of them are totally different designs which ever way you look at it, but for a Moorcroft connoisseur, the clues are all there.  Like Little Shop, Waxwing Woodland makes a triumphant entry into the Circles of Life, and Collectors fortunate enough to own both pieces, will rapidly understand why this has happened.  Better still, The Second Chance Collection will be all the more attractive as a result.