Neatly tied onions with burnished skins and hung up to dry in a suburban back garden greenhouse in the fabulously detailed Greenhouse and Garden (1937, Ferens Art Gallery) by Stanley Spencer (1891-1959). This is a view through the door of the greenhouse at 'Lindworth', Spencer's Cookham home, and is one of a group of pictures of flowers, gardens, and views of Cookham, painted between 1932 and 1938, all of which he called 'landscapes'. He referred to these paintings disparagingly as 'pot boilers' because they sold so easily (and helped him survive financially); ironically, these 'pot boilers' are now worth a great deal.  Cookham, its gardens, houses, public spaces and river provided everyday subjects for Spencer who captured both the ordinariness and beauty of his beloved village. The Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham has an exhibition entitled 'Delight in Nature; Stanley Spencer's World' until the end of October which traces the influence of the natural world on Spencer's development as an artist.

Now is the time for tidying and cleaning greenhouses in preparation for winter, so this week we have a selection of greenhouse art.

Eric Ravilious' Greenhouse: Cyclamen and Tomatoes (1935, Tate) is one of three wonderful greenhouse watercolours he painted. It illustrates the type of immaculate but labour-intensive displays which were possible when gardening labour was cheap and available. The greenhouse was one of eight built to supply Firle Place in Sussex with fresh produce, most of which did not survive a 1944 doodlebug. James Russell writes brilliantly on Ravilious (and curates excellent exhibitions eg the forthcoming 'Changing Times' at The Higgins Bedford); in a blog post he writes, "As yellow tomatoes ripen on the vine above, twin lines of cyclamen...draw us through one open doorway then another...Light and spacious, apparently roofed with nothing more substantial than tomato plants, the greenhouse offers a pleasant dream of infinite regression." This is quite possibly how the greenhouses which Anita discovers when exploring the grounds of Milton Place might have been; in the kitchen garden of the decaying country house sit two, long, disused greenhouses, now symbols of a different era.

Kate Stephens is a prolific contemporary designer of Royal Mail stamps. Amongst a number of other commissions, she designed the stamps for the Queen's 90th birthday, and this set from 2011, which marked 150 years since founding of the original William Morris company, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. in 1861. She selected designs by William Morris, Philip Webb, John Henry Dearle, Kate Faulkner (the multi-talented sister of Charles Faulkner, one of the company's founders), William de Morgan (with Morris), and Edward-Burne Jones. As with all beautifully designed sets, it would have been tempting to buy each of the different values just for the pleasure of seeing them adorn envelopes.

Marjorie Saynor (1924-2012) is typical of many a stamp designer, both male and female, whose work passes through millions of hands and is instantly recognisable, but whose name is unknown. Little is now on record for Marjorie Saynor who was a graphic designer and illustrator from Hull, but she created this lovely Cultural Traditions set, with particularly lively bagpipers and Morris dancers, issued in 1976.  

Rosalind Dease (b.1928) designed a number of stamps both in her own name and with her then-husband, David Gentleman (b.1930), who is this country's most prolific stamp designer.  Special Christmas stamps were first issued in 1966, so Rosalind's set of three which feature children playing with toys, were in the vanguard of a fresh, contemporary style. She undertook meticulous research into dolls and toys for the designs; the rocking horse is typical of the 1880s. Rosalind's daughter, Fenella was the source of inspiration for the girl in very 1960s clothes. The Queen's head in gold was the new, commemorative version and, unusually for the time, the stamp is horizontal because it was thought that people addressed envelopes close to the top before affixing the stamp. 326,078,360 rocking horse stamps were sold, which gives some idea of the enormous number of stamps produced during the Queen's reign. The Postal Museum is a valuable resource, and its background to this set by Rosalind Pease makes clear the complex process involved in producing a new stamp design. 

Sylvia Goaman (1924-2006), the daughter of JB Priestley, studied textile design in London and Paris. She worked in professional partnership with her husband Michael Goaman (1921-2009); together they achieved worldwide renown, notably for their stamps. From 1950 to 1980 they produced stamps for more than forty countries that are regarded as among the most beautiful and original of the period. One critic called them "models of functional and aesthetic efficiency", and her Daily Telegraph obituary praised "the precise detail, purity of design, handling of colour and harmony of pictorial elements with essential postage details" which were all typical of her work. She had an outstanding gift for botanical stamp design, seen here in her series to mark the International Botanical Congress in 1964. 

Someone, somewhere, may know how many postage stamps the Queen's head has appeared on over the last seventy years, and the number must be phenomenal. Now, after so long as part of our everyday visual culture, this philatelic presence will change. Many of the stamps which appeared during the Queen's long reign have been designed by women, an aspect of their work which is rarely acknowledged and celebrated. Mary Adshead (1904-95, see also Post 31 July 2017) is best known today for her large-scale murals, but she also worked on a miniature scale, and submitted numerous designs to the General Post Office, some of which were accepted. This 11d stamp is one of her definitive - as opposed to commemorative - stamps and uses the famous three-quarter pose portrait taken by photographer Dorothy Wilding (1893-1976) which remained on stamps until 1967.