My friend Mike Dibb has been sorting through his past.

We’d worked together, moons ago, on a TV series with John Berger, About Time, and now here we are in his kitchen, prising the rusted screws of a sturdy flower press he’d made for his children some 40 years before — equipment for a Scottish family holiday pastime in an analogue age. Holding our breath, we lift the octagonal sheets of cardboard to reveal perfectly preserved wildflowers.

Picked by Sam or Saul on the banks of Loch Fyne, arranged on blotters and carefully labelled in a child’s hand in red biro, lie Water Forget-me-Not, Birdsfoot Trefoil, Thrift and Tormentil.

There’s something about wildflowers — their bravura performance for no audience; their resilience and overlooked beauty — which is stirring.

But even undisturbed in darkness for half a century, the green of chlorophyll fades, the colours narrow to ochres and umbers; only the madder of heather and the purple of a North Marsh Orchid retain vestige of their once vibrant hues.

Mike gifts me a few specimens. Beautiful still, these plants exposed to light won’t last, and I have in mind to make an ‘intervention’ – to work a material change.

The cardboard layers and blotting sheets will be made from porcelain clay into which the Foxglove and the Thistle will be pressed, adding earth colours of manganese and iron oxides, then sent into the unpredictable fire of the kiln.

The plants will burn away, but all being well their imprint will remain, their essential form, preserved in clay, pressed back into the earth… just in time?

Sophie Balhetchet