The garden bought by a machine that (probably) didn't work

Here's the Overbeck's story that makes me laugh every time I think about it. This subtropical clifftop garden above Salcombe exists because of Otto Overbeck, an inventor whose most commercially successful creation was something called the "electrical rejuvenator," a device he patented in the 1920s that claimed to reverse the ageing process if users strapped its electrodes to their skin.

It sold well enough to buy him the house and garden outright. When he died in 1937, rather than keep his unlikely fortune within the family, he left the whole estate to the nation, asking only that it be used afterwards as a public park, a museum, and a hostel for young people. It's a genuinely generous ending to a story that starts with a device almost nobody would take seriously today, and the garden he left behind, full of exotic plants clinging to a sheltered clifftop, has outlasted the invention that paid for it by nearly a century.

I painted Overbeck's in watercolour and ink, those subtropical terraces above the estuary. There's a poster with a letter home and a postcard if you'd like one.

Shop the poster here: Overbeck's Garden, Salcombe · Travel Poster