Category: Drawing

It’s been a while since I drew anything just for the fun of it, so simply drawing the pile of books on the coffee table in pen appealed to me. That didn’t seem quite enough, so I added the small jug from the sideboard and brought a pen and pencil into the picture.

The book is Jane McMorland Hunter’s A Nature Poem for Every Day of the Year, which we’ve kept up to since our friend Jill bought me if for my birthday in April. This morning’s poem though had a touch of the supernatural about it: The Sphinx by Oscar Wilde.

My first drawing using Adobe Fresco for iPhone, drawn with a Wacom Bamboo stylus.

The oaks at Skelton Lake have long-stalked acorns so, as the stalk botanically is the peduncle, these are common oaks, also known as pedunculate oak.

The old oak apple is a gall caused by the gall wasp Biorhiza pallida. The larvae develop inside the corky gall, so the holes are probably where the winged adult gall wasps have emerged during the summer but they might also be where parasitic gall wasps that feed on the Biorhiza larvae have emerged. There are also inquilines, insects that use the gall for the development of their larvae without preying on the original occupants.

When the Biorhiza wasps emerge in the summer, the females lay their eggs on the roots of the oak and an all-female generation of wingless gall wasps will emerge in winter about 18 months later. These females emerge climb up to lay their eggs in the leaf buds of the oak and it’s the leaf buds which develop into oak apples.

Rough-stalked feather-moss, Brachythecium rutabulum, is a common moss on wood and rocks. It also grows in grassland and can be considered a weed in lawns. I’ve been raking and scarifying our back lawn in preparation for the winter and this looks like the moss that I was raking up. I filled a large trug with moss and dead grass.

The geese look haughtily at us and decide to move on but, as I crouch down to attempt to photograph them, the hens rush towards us, so enthusiastically that I narrowly avoid one of them pecking at the lens of my iPhone.

But they soon realise that we haven’t brought any corn with us and return to their continuing soap opera of sorting out the pecking order of the flock with a jab, flutter and squawk.

At the request of my sister, a character from the poem in yesterday’s post. As you might remember, Castro Rabbit appears in the final verse and, as far as I can understand it, he operates in ‘the meadow deep in the world squirrels’, so he’s got to be a bit of a tough cookie, surrounded by all those bright-eyed and bushy-tailed rodents.

I’m convinced that he has some connection with a scam involving ‘rattlebox-free shoes’, which gets a cryptic mention in verse 3.

Verse 1 sounds like the kind of hard-baked pulp-fiction dialogue he’d use, with more than a hint of a threat in it:

“Yeah, I know, but that is on the list,
down there in the bulkhead . . .
and it’s not that ‘cauliflower’.”

Castro Rabbit, ‘Do you say . . .’, verse 1.

But I think the line that he’s delivering here is: “Roger I’ll flax.”

A ‘flax’ must be the Squirrel Meadow equivalent of a fax, and as we’re veering towards Toon characters, Roger must be Roger Rabbit.

I’m looking forward to learning more about de Zee Cow, the one known for uttering the occasional grouse in verse 3.

“Last week I was in Ilkley,” the waller tells me, “and had some lovely sandstone, but I’m making the best of this.”

The irregular fragments of limestone in the Greenfield Valley, Upper Wharfedale, don’t stack up as neat layers but there’s plenty of material available. Another waller is repairing a section and he simply digs up a piece he needs from the turf alongside the wall.

The hogget hole allows sheep to pass through. This one can be blocked by the slab lying beside the wall on the roadside verge. A hogget is a young sheep.

It’s been another exciting day down at the chicken coop.