Category: Flowers

Old Moor Sketches

Sketches made over the last two days at RSPB Old Moor, South Yorkshire. Having practiced some botanical illustration in the studio last week, I wanted to see how I could carry that through into sketchbook work.

It was so warm at lunchtime today that I took shelter in the family hide, which was pleasantly cool with all the flaps open and light; unusually for a hide it has floor to ceiling windows. Again with improving my observation in mind, I concentrated on one species, the lapwing, until a black-headed gull chased it away.

Great burnet and yellow-rattle.
A variable species, this was growing in a dry area, by a hedge near the visitor centre.
Marsh orchid, probably the Northern Marsh Orchid.
Scrambling amongst vegetation by the marsh.
Melilot, a tall leguminous herb on drier ground.
Lapwing in moult. I guess that it’s an adult but it could be a juvenile coming into its adult plumage.
Purple loosestife – my last sketch of the day and it proved quite a challenge with all those interlocking stems and foliage, especially as it kept blowing about in the afternoon breeze.

Potato

potatoHaving the plant right there in front of me should make it easy but, like all flowers, this potato is a restless sitter.

It takes me longer than I think to get so far and I’m far from satisfied with the result but the end result isn’t really the point of the exercise;

‘You can only reproduce something well if you [see and observe]. If you can decode what you see, you will be able to explain it, and anyone who sees your drawing will be able to understand it. The artist’s view is just as important and personal as the subject itself.’

Agathe Haevermans, Drawing and Painting the Seashore

I’m happy just to spend the day observing and hopefully turning that into a successful botanical drawing will follow on from that.

In Impressionism by sampling spots of colour in a detached way, you should be able to build up a convincing image even of an object in the landscape that you can’t identify. Courbet was supposedly able to accurately paint a patch on a distant hillside without ever asking what it was – a limestone outcrop, a patch of dried vegetation or a pile of chippings. The colour and texture were enough.

With botanic drawing you’re really trying to deconstruct then reconstruct the subject in order to clearly explain it.

potato flower partsPerhaps I should have taken the flower apart before I started drawing.

 

Potato in Pencil

potato flowers in pencilMr AtkinsonMr Atkinson, my maths teacher, saw me struggling with geometry and examined my pencil;

‘You could plant a potato with that, Bell!’

Sharpening up my act, this morning I’m drawing potato flowers with a 4H pencil, sharpened with a craft knife and honed to a point with an abrasive pad.

I don’t ever remember choosing a 4H for drawing but I’m taking advice from Agathe Haevermans’ The Art of Botanical Drawing and she often suggests starting out with a hard pencil. If you need to erase there’s less risk of damaging the surface of the paper because the harder lead stays on the surface.

For white flowers like these she suggests erasing almost to the point where your outlines become invisible, so that you don’t get pencil lines showing through your wash.

This variety of second early potato is Vivaldi and, by coincidence when I started this drawing they were playing Vivaldi’s Concerto in B Flat on Radio 3.

Sage Advice

 

sageI like to draw is on location, direct from nature so why have I brought this herb into my studio?

After reading up on botany this spring I feel the need to go in closer to my subject, something that I struggle to do when flowers are blowing about in the meadow.

pencil

I’ve resisted the urge to reach for my pen but I still want a sharp line so I use an abrasive pad to keep a point on my HB pencil. I need to do this four or five times during the course of the drawing.

Botanical Drawing

The Art of Botanical Drawing by Agathe Ravet-Haevermans has given me some gentle encouragement. There are meticulous examples of her work as a scientific illustrator at the Museum of Natural History in Paris but also a few sketches from her field trips in Madagascar and South Africa. Step by step drawings and swatches of the watercolours used in each example show how she depicts the flowers, fruits and foliage of familiar garden flowers and exotic blooms.

botanic drawing
Pink Pig 8 x 8 Amelele 270 gsm watercolour sketchbook, White Nights watercolours, Cotman reversible brushes.

My favourites amongst them are the different kinds of bark, the cherry tomatoes on a vine, the fungi and the bunch of carrots.

Encouragingly for the rest of us she concludes with a selection of her mistakes; ‘But is it such a disaster? It’s just time and a sheet of paper. The most important thing is to be able to learn from it.’

I’ll keep that in mind as I try to get into botanical mode.

Link; Agathe Haevermans, L’Institut de Systématique, Évolution, Biodiversité

Wood Avens

wood avensThe bobbles of hooked seeds of wood avens are spreading out over the pavement at the end of our drive. My guess is that fifteen or twenty years ago it originally established itself from a seed carried here attached to the coat of a dog returning from a walk in Coxley woods.

It’s made itself at home at the edge of the spreading ivy beneath our rowan, the sort of shady place on fertile soil that this plant prefers. There is now so much of it that many of the seeds must be making the reverse journey back into the woods as dogs pass by each morning.

It’s a member of the rose family with a five-petalled yellow flower with five sepals. It’s lower leaves remind me of nettle but the upper leaves that I’ve drawn here are three-lobed.

Also known a herb bennet, which, according to Richard Mabey’s Flora Britannica, comes from the medieval Latin ‘herba benedicta’, ‘the blessed herb’;

‘Its root has a spicy clove smell and was widely used in herbal medicine.’

Latin Roots

Its Latin name is Geum urbanum. Geum was the name of a herb mentioned by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History. It might derive from ‘geuo’, the Greek meaning ‘to taste’, referring to those aromatic roots. ‘Urbanum’ means ‘of the town’.

Pliny the Elder died on 25 August 79 A.D. at Pompeii. A quote attributed to his nephew and heir Pliny the Younger opens the film Pompeii;

‘You could hear the shrieks of women, the wailing of infants, and the shouting of men; some were calling their parents, others their children or their wives, trying to recognize them by their voices. People bewailed their own fate or that of their relatives, and there were some who prayed for death in their terror of dying. Many besought the aid of the gods, but still more imagined there were no gods left, and that the universe was plunged into eternal darkness for evermore’

I thought that Pliny the Elder might get a walk on part during the movie. If he did, I missed it.

Pompeii is an epic best enjoyed in 3D and surround-sound but I could have happily spent the time taking a leisurely tour through its impressively  reconstructed street food shops, villas and temples of Pompeii and missed out on the gladiatorial combat and eruption, impressive as they were. Perhaps we could have a prequel; A Short Tour of Pompeii with Pliny the Elder.

Peace Lily

Peace lily, spathiphyllumThe Peace Lily, Spathiphyllum wallisii, is stemless, the leaves and flowers growing directly from the compost. Although it is from tropical America the leaves can be damaged by strong sunlight.

The flower reminds me of the cuckoo flower. It consists of a spadix – the sausage-shaped flowerhead – which is sheathed in a spathe; a leaf-like bract. The spathe is white to start with but gradually turns pale green.

Pencil and Watercolour

Drawn with HB Derwent Graphic pencil which I sharpened to a fine point on a metal emery board. Watercolours are White Night. I prefer Winsor and Newton but White Nights are perfectly acceptable and I’ve got a greater range of colours in a larger box.

Instead of the waterbrush that I normally use, I’ve gone for a Cotman no. 10 field brush and a Cotman no. 3 reversible (brush fits into handle). The number 3 is finer than I’d normally use but I’m trying to manage without a fine pen to provide sharpness in the botanical details.

Buttercup

buttercup   corollaThis creeping buttercup is growing at the edge of our little meadow but leaves of meadow buttercup are starting to show in the middle.

As you can see from the notes, I’m making attempts to learn a bit more about botany and I’ve just finished reading a book that has been sitting unread on my shelves since the 1970s, Plants in Action, which accompanied a BBC television series.

Dicots and Monocots

Dandelion flower-bud
Dandelion flower-bud

It’s makes a good introduction but inevitably some of the botany is now out of date. Looking at a more recent publication, Dorling Kindersley’s The Natural History Book, points out that three-quarters of the world’s plants, including buttercups and dandelions, are now classified as Eudicotyledons, not Dicotyledons as they were previously.

The old division was between the ‘dicots’, which had two seed-leaves and the ‘monocots’, which had just the one. Some of the earliest flowering plants to appear in the fossil record are now classified as Basal Angiosperms and Magnoliids.

There are some familiar present-day species in these ancient groups including water lilies, bay, star anise and magnolia.

Wedge of Meadow

meadow

yellow rattle
Yellow Rattle

IT’S EXPECTING a lot to wedge my wildflower meadow between the potato & onion bed and the bottom corner of the garden. I’ve still got to to dig out the chicory that has muscled out all the competition on the strip alongside the hedge, on the right of my photograph. I weeded this attractive but invasive wild flower out along the other two edges the triangle in the spring and resowed with a wildflower meadow seed mix which has sprouted so luxuriantly that I now need to trim it to create a perimeter path.

I’m pleased that in the central area the yellow rattle is flowering again this year. The theory is that it will keep the grasses in check because it is semi-parasitic on their roots but the grasses are thriving.

meadow
Looking back from the bench in the corner

Hairy Bittercress


hairy bittercressHAIRY BITTERCRESS, Cardamine hirsuta, growing in the shady flower bed by the front door, is one of those little green jobs, a garden weed that looks so nondescript that you might think that it would be impossible to identify it.

The four-petalled cross-shaped flowers show that it’s a crucifer, a member the cabbage, cress and mustard family, formerly the Cruciferae but now known botanically as the Brassicaceae family.

The leaf-shapes and the sausage-shaped seed-pods help me narrow it down to hairy bittercress and a hand lens reveals that, as the species name hirsuta suggests, the stems and the backs of the leaves are covered in little hairs.

flower

You also need a hand lens to spot that its flower has four stamens. This distinguishes hairy bittercress from a similar looking species, the wavy bittercress, Cardamine flexuosa, also known as greater bittercress.