Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
This sycamore leaf has a blob of tar spot fungus across its midrib.
I picked it up at the weekend at Barbara’s brother’s garden in Ossett and on rough ground by the lane found these dry stems. Although the flower head has a flattish top like an umbel the individual stems emerge from different points on the stem, so botanically it’s a corymb.
I think that it might be tansy.
A week ago when we bought this pot of Tête-à-Tête narcissi, they looked like stunted miniatures. They’ve soon grown and opened their flower buds on the kitchen windowsill and I’ve only just caught them before they go to seed.
When they’re over we’ll plant the bulbs in the border near the hedge.
After this winter, I’m right out of practice with botanical subjects so, determined to make a new start, on the first of March I dug this weed up from one of the veg beds and put it into a three inch pot to draw in close-up.
I tried going for a looser approach with pencil and watercolour but felt that I was losing my grip on its appearance.
The pen and ink study made through the magnifying lens of a desk-lamp gave me definition but became too tight.
This last, loose drawing with an ArtPen is less of a botanical study but is in the sketching from life style that I feel more at home with.
Fleabane, Pulicaria dysenterica, grows in the meadow areas by the ponds at Old Moor.
Its ragged-edged flowers are giving way to furry clocks of achenes.
An achene is a dry fruit. They might appear to be seeds but, like any fruit, they have a covering, it’s just that in this case the covering is dry, not fleshy, and it encloses the single seed so closely that it appears to be just a extra coating for the seed.
11.16 a.m.; a movement just beyond the fleabane. Quite a substantial animal – a rat?
Beady EyeNo, its a darker, glossier mahogany brown. The stoat is so close that I can see the glint in its eye as it pauses and stares at me for a few seconds then turns back on its run through the grasses.
It’s a cliche but it has beady eyes. Deep brown with a sharp highlight. It was taking me in then coming to a decision.
It reminds me of a passage from Orwell’s Coming up for Air; ‘I was looking at the field, and the field was looking at me.’
And I’ve just come across this advice to photographers;
‘Be still with yourself until the object of your attention affirms your presence.’
Minor White
I’m still not quite sure who saw who first.
Time for my morning coffee break which happens to be just as the fruit scones come out of the oven. However they should come with a health warning; I break a filling as I’m eating it and have to head back home to arrange to see my dentist!
What bad luck. It reminds me that there’s an old country superstition that a stoat crossing your path will bring you bad luck but my mum told us there was a remedy for this.
At the place where you saw the stoat, leave a coin at the side of the path and whoever picks up the coin inherits the dose of bad luck. However I really wouldn’t want anyone else to break a filling today, I couldn’t be so cruel!
She had a similar remedy for warts; pick up as many pebbles as you have warts and put those in a paper bag.
Leave the bag lying around where it might be see by a unsuspecting passer-by. Your warts will disappear when someone opens the bag. Unfortunately they will get your warts.
Not a nice thing to do. I must ask her who taught her these folk remedies. My guess would be her granny, Sarah Ann, born 1850. Sounds just like one of her tales.
I couldn’t see much of the flowers of red bartsia, which poke their purplish-red lips out of the calyxes which are arranged facing the same way along the stem. Perhaps of the resemblance flower spike to a row of pointed teeth is why the plant acquired a reputation as a herbal remedy for tootache. Carl Linnaeus gave it the Latin name, Odontites verna; Odontites was a name that Pliny gave to a plant that was said to be good for treating toothache.
The racemes (toothbrush-like arrangements) of the flowers led to this familiar weed’s old Yorkshire name of cock’s comb.
Red bartsia is a member of the Figwort family and, like its relative the yellow rattle, it is semi-parasitic on the roots of grasses.
Bartsia was named by Linnaeus in memory of his friend, the German physician and botanist Johann Bartsch who died aged 29 in Suriname in 1738.
‘A reed shaken by the wind’ is my subject at Old Moor today. I’ve labelled it as the common reed, Phragmites communis, but Wikipedia points out that communis is considered an ‘illegitimate name’ and that I should now be calling it Phragmites australis.
It resists the wind not just by its flexibility and its hollow stem construction but because the leaves, growing from sheathes that clasp the stem can rotate as they’re blown around.
While my habitual pen and brown ink might be appropriate for the reed, but I felt that would be too strident for the white water-lily, Nymphaea alba. Dragonflies zoomed around over the pond but the only insects visiting the water-lily as I drew it were a few flies.
Water mint, Mentha aquatica, is now in flower, growing along the edges of the drainage ditches.
Water plantain, Alisma plantago-aquatica, was growing next to it, emerging from the water. Ruskin saw the elegant arrangement of veins in its leaves as an example of the kind of ‘divine proportion’ that inspired Gothic architecture.
When Convent Thoughts, a sharp-focus study of a contemplative nun standing by a lily pond by the Pre-Raphaelite painter Charles Allston Collins’, came in for criticism at the 1851 Royal Academy summer show, Ruskin wrote in a letter to The Times;
“I happen to have a special acquaintance with the water plant Alisma Plantago . . and . . I never saw it so thoroughly or so well drawn. For as a mere botanical study of the Water Lily and Alisma, as well as of the common lily and several other garden flowers, this picture would be invaluable to me, and I heartily wish it were mine.”
Ruskin’s endorsement helped redress the criticism but, although habitat may be right for it, Alisma plantago, the water plantain, doesn’t appear in the painting.
This rather spindly wild carrot was growing in a sunny south-facing clearing amongst the willows, alders and dragonfly ponds at RSPB Old Moor nature reserve.
I was drawing the fly which settled on my left arm when a fresh-looking comma settled on my right leg. The fly then moved to my nose and, as it had a suspiciuosly long beak-like proboscis, I had to brush it away, losing my chance to sketch the butterfly.
The Yorkshire Wildlife Trust’s Ledsham Vale is a long thin strip of meadow so as the rest of group make their way to the top end I can pause to draw field scabious.
We saw six or seven fresh-looking marbled whites.
I’ve always preferred to use cartridge for sketchbook work and to save the more expensive watercolour paper for my finished work but I’ve recently moved over to Pink Pig’s Ameleie watercolour sketchbooks, which I think is a step in the right direction.
Today as I set out to a golden wedding garden party I grabbed an A5 landscape format Langton sketchbook. Langton is traditionally mould made fine grained 300 gm (140 lb) ‘Not’ paper. ‘Not’ means cold rather than hot pressed. I thought this might be too absorbent and textured for ink but there’s no sign of bleeding, which makes a welcome change from my current ‘Wainwright’ sketchbook.
The ‘hammered’ surface of the paper is enough to give a slight stippliness, which adds character to a watercolour wash.
I’ve been back at the RSPB’s Old Moor reserve, keeping my focus on flowers, which makes sense as it’s rather a quiet time for birds. I’ve added more drawings to some of last week’s pages.
