4.20 p.m. THE LIGHT is fading and a towering wall of grey cloud is lumbering in from the south. The colour drains from the landscape so that it is guesswork when I add the final washes to my sketch. A waning Moon and Jupiter appear to get brighter and brighter high above the wood.
With a final bit of decorating completed this morning, we’ve had a free day but unfortunately it was too wild for us to get out walking. Hail rattled the roof of Armitage’s garden centre as we sat looking out from their appropriately named Season’s café towards the tops of the Pennines.
Plant Window
Finally, here’s a third sketch of my room as it appeared in my 1978 sketchbook. I brought back a plant box that I’d made at college and devised a plant window for my room in the flat by getting a piece of plate glass cut to size as a shelf. The species are limited to streptocarpus, also known as the Cape Primrose, which I grew from leaf cuttings, and Spider Plant, Chlorophytum, which is even easier to grow from the plantlets that grow at the tips of branches. The spiky plant bottom right is a Euphorbia, a native of Madagascar, which I had grown from a stem cutting a year or two earlier from the college greenhouse.
