Woodland Gardens Bridge, Bushy Park

A timber footbridge across a green-canopied stretch of water, sun coming through the leaves. Reeds on the left bank, ducks resting on the surface. Mid-May, the whole thing pitched into fresh greens and shadow, a strip of warm path on the right.

An original watercolour of a Bushy Park footbridge over the Longford River, painted on Arches HP 100% cotton. The Longford is Charles I’s twelve-mile canal — built in the 1630s to bring water from the River Colne to Hampton Court Palace — and it threads through the park’s Woodland Gardens in a series of slow, planted reaches. A handful of wooden bridges cross it here; by summer the canopy closes overhead and the water goes dim and green.