Swiss chard at Harlow Carr, drawn with my non-dominant left hand.
Swiss Chard
Category: Art
Guest Artist
A guest illustrator in my nature diary in the July ‘Dalesman’: Jenny Hawksley, who joined us for a lightning tour of the North Yorks Moors and coast last summer drew the garland of wild flowers.
Lighthouse
Experimenting with Procreate and loosely based on Coquet Island lighthouse but minus the puffins, sandwich and roseate terns this is my take on the first project in the ‘Beginner’s Guide to Digital Painting in Procreate’. My thanks to freelance director and artist Izzy Burton for her step-by-step tutorial.
Foxgloves
‘Versatile, bee-friendly, drop-dead gorgeous,’ foxgloves are the cover star of this month’s RHS ‘Garden’ magazine.
They self seed around the garden and we’ve got more than usual this year as we haven’t cleared them from the veg beds, which we’re revamping this year.
Hitchcock’s Yorkshire Period
Hitchcock’s little known Yorkshire Period.
Some great ‘Nottamun’ Folk songs.
Foodie Legends of Scotland. Between us Barbara and I have sampled 5 of the 6 in this line-up.
The World’s Greatest Beetroots.
Happy recent birthdays to Roger, Sofia, Liz and Damian.
Star Trek Tykes
Which one of these Star Trek characters was played by a Huddersfield Town supporter?
Clue: One of them was a Spurs fan 😮
Clue 2: The actor in question recently wrote an autobiography Making it So, which opens with a vividly written evocation of life, amateur dramatics and local journalism in Mirfield and Dewsbury in the late 1940s and 1950s.
Happy birthday John and hope that Huddersfield continue to boldly go where no team has gone before.
Yorkshire Bird Song
How to Recognise Yorkshire Bird Calls. Happy birthday Olivia for yesterday.
Pebbles at Spurn
Ice Age glaciers and longshore drift have contributed a variety of pebbles to the beach at the northern, landward, end of the spit at Spurn which stretches almost three miles out across the mouth of the Humber Estuary.
Despite previous attempts to protect the spit, high tides now wash over it in places.
Marram grass, Ammophila arenia, stabalises the shifting sands of the dunes.
I was surprised to see a single patch of bluebells, Hyacinthoides non-scripta, growing amongst the marram to the west of the track not far from the area known at The Warren.
Washed up on the beach, a velvet swimming crab, Necora puber, with blue markings on its pincers, legs and shell.
Hornwrack, Flustra foliacea, not a seaweed but a colonial animal. Individual ‘sea moss’ filter-feeding animals called zooids lived in tiny cells that you can see as the stippled surface texture of the fronds.
Maris Peer
Still a bit too early to put these in as we’re still having the occasional overnight frost.
Yorkshire’s Greatest Photographers
Let’s celebrate Yorkshire’s Greatest Photographers . . .
Happy birthday John.
Other Great Yorkshire Photographers are available. Apologies to Paul, Robert, Jim . . .