Whilst residing with Elsbeth Juda in Bargemon, Coker was permitted by her friend and neighbour, Elisabeth Collins, to work in the extensive gardens of her home, Le Vieux Château. The exotic and plentiful flora impressed themselves on Coker’s imagination
and precipitated a number of depictions of bountiful palms and spiky agaves.

In this view, The Palm, Château Garden, Coker looks down from a balcony onto a chamaerops palm with an oblique view of railings to the lower left of the composition and the azure blue of a swimming pool to the upper right. The dialogue between interior and exterior – the potential of the threshold and the shifting fall of light – featured prominently in Coker’s oeuvre at this juncture in his career. Certainly, The Palm, Château Garden bears elements of this perceptual investigation as the natural and the man-made intersect with the wilderness bursting up from the confines of the courtyard. This distinctive angle was the subject of four watercolours and drawings and two canvases including The Palm, Château Garden: the other iteration is most likely destroyed. Dramatic or distorted perspectives featured in Coker’s work from his earliest Butcher’s Shop pieces but this viewpoint is extreme as to verge on the abstract without an explanation of the set-up. Instead, an explosion of furious slashes of yellow,
green and black – the preponderance of palm leaves – burgeon from the centre of the picture in a whirl of dynamism. Introducing Coker’s 1992 Abbot Hall exhibition, Frederick Gore argued that, “his visual and conceptual experience of a landscape which he has seen and drawn is for him abstract in its forms, colour and texture: in effect an abstract painting. It is deliberately wrought because he is a craftsman, but full of exciting accidents: an object in its own right.” Truthfulness to appearance is supplanted by truthfulness to experience: through the animated vortex of strokes of jewel-like colours Coker conveys the heat, the light, the verdant lushness of southern France. Painting sensation necessitated “imagination to be able to manipulate the composition and…creative freedom to alter colours.” Coker distorts perspective and heightens colour for “directness of statement”, simulating the visceral, fleeting impressions that constitute the most evocative of memories.