English Summer Garden Rubber Stamp | Detailed Stamp for Card Making & Colouring In

This English summer garden rubber stamp is a different kind of pleasure — a long, highly detailed scene designed to be stamped in outline and then coloured in. It's the kind of project for a slow afternoon with a cup of tea, a set of watercolours and nowhere to be.

The design began as an original lino cut in my studio, drawn from the kind of cottage garden I love — a tangle of summer borders, a winding path, a little wooden shed at the top, the whole quiet richness of an English garden in July. I cut it deliberately to leave plenty of open space for colour, which is really where the fun is.

The designs

• English Garden Stamp — 6.5 × 13.5 cm
• Snail, Left-facing — 5.5 × 2.5 cm
• Snail, Right-facing — 5.5 × 2.5 cm

How to colour it in

Start by stamping the design with a pigment ink — I used Fallen Leaves and Portobello VersaFine Clair in the sample, both warm browns that play beautifully with colour on top. Once it's fully dry, fill the scene however you like:

• Watercolour for soft, painterly washes — the most forgiving
• Pencil crayons for fine detail and gentle blending
• Felt tips or brush pens for bold, saturated colour

A few ways to use it

Tuck a snail (left- or right-facing) into the foreground and you have a complete cottage-garden scene — perfect for a long birthday card, a summer note, or a small piece of finished art to frame. Print and colour the garden on the left of a folded card, then add a favourite quote or verse alongside using one of the calligraphy or text stamps from the Noolibird range — a Kahlil Gibran line about the earth, or anything from a poetry book on the shelf, makes the finished piece feel really considered.

The garden also makes a beautiful inside-the-card panel, with a hand-coloured scene revealed when the recipient opens it. And it combines beautifully with stamps from the Garden Stamps and Vegetable Stamps ranges if you fancy adding a watering can, a robin, a gardener at work, or a row of beetroot in the foreground.

Ink pads used in the sample image

I stamped the sample using Fallen Leaves and Portobello VersaFine Clair ink pads.