This gryke gives shelter to the kind of plants that you’d see in a hedgerow or in woodland. A velvety coat of moss on the limestone indicates how far the humid, sheltered zone of the gryke extends. In this particular crevice I noted wild garlic, dogs mercury, meadowsweet and creeping thistle.
A gryke is a crack between the clints (slabs) that make up a limestone pavement.
It might be sheltered for the plants down there but there was a cool breeze blowing down the valley this morning and the slab of limestone that I was sitting on proved surprisingly uncomfortable, even though I was sitting on a thin foam mat, so this is as far as I got with my sketch.
On a cool breezy morning at Rabbit Ings country park, Royston, South Yorkshire, the only butterflies we see on our walk with Wakefield Naturalists’ Society are a small copper and dingy skipper which are sheltering on the south-facing bank of a ditch. They soon flit away and most of the wild flowers I film are equally restless, as they’re buffeted about by the wind.
Rabbit Ings country park is centred on the restored spoil heap of Monckton colliery. As you follow the path along the contour of the hill from the far end, a distant view of the gritstone moors of the Peak District opens up to the south-west, beyond Barnsley.
I’m guessing that the mystery object in my YouTube movie is a fox scat. It doesn’t look quite right for a short-eared owl pellet.
The grass on the Onward Christian Soldiers memorial stone green at Horbury Bridge has been allowed to grow as the daffodils fade away and now the dandelions are in flower. A single fasciated dandelion is growing behind the bench.
Fasciation occurs when the the apical meristem (growing tip) of a plant becomes elongated instead of growing as a single point. This can be a genetic or hormonal abnormality but it can also be caused by a fungus, bacteria or virus. Alternatively it could be a reaction to something in the plant’s environment.
The dandelion on the left is growing from a crack between concrete paviers at the edge of our driveway. I decided that I’d enjoy drawing it before weeding it out. This is the first proper drawing that I’ve done with my new Lamy Safari fountain pen. It’s giving me a similar result to a dip pen and Indian ink but it’s much more convenient.
However convincing artificial flowers are, they’re somehow not as much fun to draw. It would be like drawing a waxwork instead of a real human being.
Not much to report re. wildlife today but, armed with my new pen, I sketched the heron on its morning rounds, flying a bit lower than usual across our street.
Violets grow like weeds at my mum’s house, in the borders around the edge of the lawn. It’s a long time since I sat out drawing in the front garden at Smeath House and I’d forgotten how peaceful it is here. Three rival blackbirds are singing from corners of the shrubbery. The variegated beech tree, planted by the mill-owning Baines family who built the house, shades the front lawn so that the habitat now resembles a woodland glade.
In 1960, when I was aged nine, I drew a sketch map of the bird life of shrubbery, lawn and house, including blackbirds, starlings and sparrows.
The bluebells – which I don’t believe we ever planted – look like natives. The bells hang down, while the more vigorous Spanish bluebells, which grow in the border in our own back garden, face outwards.
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.
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 Eye
No, 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!
A Cure for Warts
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.
Smalltoothcombia Domestica, from Edward Lear’s Nonsense Botany.
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.
This gryke gives shelter to the kind of plants that you’d see in a hedgerow or in woodland. A velvety coat of moss on the limestone indicates how far the humid, sheltered zone of the gryke extends. In this particular crevice I noted wild garlic, dogs mercury, meadowsweet and creeping thistle.
The grass on the Onward Christian Soldiers memorial stone green at Horbury Bridge has been allowed to grow as the daffodils fade away and now the dandelions are in flower. A single fasciated dandelion is growing behind the bench.
Fleabane, Pulicaria dysenterica, grows in the meadow areas by the ponds at Old Moor.
