Video: Ivor Abrahams RA at Mayor Gallery

Royal Academician Ivor Abrahams began using gardens as a motif in his work in the 1970s. In recent years he has returned to the subject with a renewed enthusiasm, following an exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute in 2008 that focused on his early prints and sculptures of gardens.

"I was so inspired by the way they treated it, it rekindled the idea so I started to do some more," he explains.

A number of his recent garden works, currently on display at the Mayor Gallery in Mayfair, combine relief sculpture with the painted surface. Verdant flower beds explode with a profusion of foliage and flowers in a variety of different textures: "I've never made anything as detailed as this, my earlier work was much more generalised," he says.

In this video, Abrahams describes the enduring appeal of gardens as a subject, and explains why an early diagnosis of partial colourblindness led him to take up polychromatic sculpture rather than painting.

• Ivor Abrahams: The Garden Revisited, until 8 February 2013

• Royal Academy of Arts