Category: Flowers

Meadow Update

Chicory in flower later in the year.

A QUICK update on the patch of wildflower meadow that I replanted on the 6 April; it looks even smaller now that the hedge is in full leaf and the surrounding Cow Parsley, nettle and Chicory have grown but you can see how effective our weeding out of Chicory and docks in the central area has been. At this time of year this would normally be wall to wall Chicory and dock.

The strip of turf at the back has established itself successfully and the grass seed in the meadow mix has greened the bare soil but I can see that there are also a lot of seedlings of Opium Poppy coming up, a species that wasn’t in the meadow mix but whose seeds are scattered all over our garden. It’s a plant that I like to see and to draw but I’ll have to weed them out to prevent their lush foliage shading out the wild flower seeds that I’ve sown.

Buttercups and Red Clover are already in flower on the strip of turf so I’ve got some idea of the final effect.

Next job; to mow down the Chicory to create a path around the edges. I don’t want it to spread into the central area again so it’s going to mean some more weeding and then I’ll sow the edges with suitable grass seed.

May Blossom

THE FIRST Hawthorn in blossom is a bush overhanging the railway cutting at the foot of Addingford Steps. It gets the warmth from the south-facing brick embankment below.

The hawthorn blossom has a sweet smell, I wouldn’t call it a ‘heady’ smell; it’s not an over-the-top sweetness nor is it sugary sweet like sherbet it’s just, um, sweetish.

Each flower has five petals, which is not surprising because Hawthorn is a member of the rose family, Rosaceae. There’s one female pistil in the middle surrounded by a number of male stamens, each with a reddish tip. When you see the haws, the hawthorn berries, later in the year, the petals and stamens have withered away but you can still see the remnant of the pistil at the end of the berry.

Botanically the haw is a true berry, even though it might seem too pulpy and woody to qualify as what we’d expect if we bought a ‘mixed berries’ yogurt. From a botanical perspective raspberries and blackberries aren’t berries, they’re collections of drupes; fleshy, thin-skinned fruits containing the seed in a stone. Smaller versions of single drupe fruits such as the cherry, plum and olive.

Ra-cha-cha-chat

What bird sings from a bush by the canal, opposite a flooded marshy field known as the Strands, in what I’ve described in my field notes as an ‘agitated chattering, rasping, stoccato, occasional morse code phrases’?

Like smells, bird song is difficult to describe in words!

Sunday was International Dawn Chorus day. At this time of year you get the full variety of the dawn chorus as the summer migrants have joined our resident birds. I’m no expert on bird song but at least having got out a bit this spring I’m familiar enough with our residents to spot a new and noticeably different song.

 Crab Apple blossom at the Strands last week

This song is one that I’ve heard down by this marshy field before and I know that it’s either Reed or Sedge Warbler. I always forget which one by the time it appears next year. I didn’t manage to focus my binoculars on it but thought that I glimpsed it singing inconspicuously from halfway up in the bush.

The RSPB website (see link below) describes the song of the Sedge Warbler as ‘a noisy, rambling warble compared to the more rhythmic song of the reed warbler’. Reed Warblers are, anyway, as the name suggests, more typical of areas with large reedbeds. You’ll find Sedge Warblers in reedbeds too but also at damp wetlands like the Strands, where you’re less likely to find the Reed Warbler.

Link; The Sedge Warbler page on the RSPB website helpfully includes a recording of the song.

Kingcups

I’M NOT FINDING pen and Indian ink a responsive medium as I draw these Kingcups by the pond. If I don’t press heavily enough on the paper I don’t get a mark but if I press too hard on the springy nib the pressure builds up for a moment and then – whizz! – the nib sets off and draws a straighter line than I’d intended!

Surely, if I keep at it, I can exercise some relaxed control over the recalcitrant medium. The ink soon goes claggy and even during this short session of drawing I have to pause to clean the coagulating Winsor & Newton black ink from the nib.

Is it the beautifully sunny but not sultry weather that’s drying the ink too quickly or is it the shrill excited scream every five seconds of next door’s children playing happily on a trampoline a few yards away that’s putting me off my stroke?

I think that I’ve been spoilt by the predictably flowing combination of ArtPen and Noodler’s ink. It’s second nature to draw with that combination, but I would like to experiment with different mediums, which create different marks.

Anyway, time to admit defeat, perhaps I’ll add some colour later when it’s a bit quieter!

The Ionian Sea

OUR BALCONY looks out towards the rugged limestone hills of the Greek mainland across the calm (while we were there) Ionian Sea. Every evening and morning there were a few small fishing boats about. I was impressed by the variety of fish at the fish stalls by the harbour; anchovies and sardines, the occasional pipefish, Red Scorpion-fish, still alive but gasping in their crate, which the fishermen warned us were difficult to prepare, a swordfish and other species which looked vaguely familiar but which I couldn’t put a name to. I did feel that some of the fish were rather small, particularly the swordfish which was little more than eighteen inches long including the sword. Hope that’s not an indication of overfishing. If you’ve caught a small swordfish, I guess that it’s then too late throw it back in to grow to adult size, so it might as well be eaten.

Common Wall Lizard, Podarcis muralis, this lizard with an orange underside and blue beneath the chin is the one that we see basking at the edge of the pavement as we walk into Benitses.

Naked Man Orchid

The Naked Man Orchid, Orchis italica, is found throughout the Mediterranean on grassy slopes, as here amongst the olives and cyrpresses, and in heathy garrigue and maquis habitats. Edward Lear was an enthusiastic visitor to Corfu and made watercolour sketches here. These flowers, with ‘arms’, ‘legs’ and anatomical details, remind me of the species Manypeeplia upsidedownia in his Nonsense Botany.

According to Collins Complete Guide to Mediterranean Wildlife, Red Helleborine, Cephalanthera rubra, ‘favours dry, shady woodlands, invariably on calcareous soils’, which is a good description of this clearing amongst the olives.

A Blue Pimpernel

The intense blue put me off but I should have realised that this flower growing by a dry path on an east-facing slope through the olives is a relative of our Scarlet Pimpernel, that grows in similar situations back home. It’s Anagallis foemina.

The Feast of St Thomas

WE’D BEEN invited to see the church procession at the Achillion Palace by Fedon and Christina who run the apartments because their son was playing the euphonium in the Milea village band. The procession marked the feast day of Doubting Thomas.

The word iconic tends to get overused so it was interesting to see icons, the genuine item, being used in this Greek Orthodox ceremony. Two paintings formed the centre piece of the procession. Flag and banner bearers led the way followed by the village band, a  women’s choir (singing ‘A capella’ which means in the manner of the church, unaccompanied by music in the Greek Orthodox tradition), the priest and his attentdants, incense censers, cross bearers and others with bronze starburst or sun emblems on poles (heavy things to carry in the midday heat for a couple of miles) followed by what appeared to be centuries old iconic paintings of the Virgin and the saints, the second of which was further protected by a large canopy supported by polebearers.

There was a short service with hymns, prayers and a reading before the procession entered the grounds of the Achillion and another back in the village.

At the end of the ceremony, as the black-suited church elders kissed the silver cover of the priest’s Bible, Fedon explained; ‘They’re praying for the politicians who are going to take over Greece!’

We followed the procession down narrow streets – so narrow that they had to dismantle the canopy and walk single file through one alley – back down to the church.

The bells were ringing; a man had climbed a ladder to the bell tower and he was alternately ringing the bells, using straps hanging from their clappers.

Trying to use the free tourist map as a walking map didn’t work out for us as we tried to find a way across the hill from the Achillion Palace to Benitses. We found ourselves on a crag, frustratingly close, high above the rooftops of the village but with no path down. We had to retrace our steps and unfortunately by then we’d almost finished our bottle of water. But the walk did work out well for wildlife. We spotted some orchids which we came back to draw another day and on the top of the crag I disturbed an Agama, a stocky lizard with spiky scales. We got a better view of two of on the last full day of our holiday on a little crag by the road through Milia. One of those had a bright yellow patch beneath its chin.

When we finally retraced our steps back to the sea front at Benitses we got a good view of a Yellow-legged Gull, its yellow legs showing up well as it stood on the breakwater by the harbour.

The Green Sandpiper probing along the water’s edge attracted Barbara’s attention with its wagtail-like bobbing and the white on its rump.

Lemons at Andromaches: ‘help yourself if you need one!’ said Christina.

Woodchat Shrike

THE CONES of this cypress have 12 scales. On this fallen fragment the dark green scaly leaflets have dried to ochre brown. In colour, shape and texture these plates, and the tiny scales that cover the leaf stems when seen through a hand lens, remind me of the armour of an armadillo.

10.34 a.m.; the Woodchat Shrike is a summer visitor to Corfu. At 18 cm, it’s almost Song Thrush size.

This bird (right) looked very much like a buzzard but birds of prey are so difficult to identify, especially when circling against a bright sky. We saw two later and heard a buzzard-like peevish ‘mewing’ call.

As I drew this flower at the car parking area at our apartments I didn’t realise that it was a buttercup; the petals are more pointed than those of our British buttercups but I should have guessed as its mace-like seed-heads remind me of the largest of our native buttercups, Kingcups.

The nearest that I can find in the book is Jersey Buttercup, Ranunculus paludosus, which fits in almost every detail, except that I wouldn’t have described it as a ‘hairy perennial’.

I tried pencil when I started drawing the buttercup but soon resorted to the precision of a 01 sized nibbed Pilot Drawing Pen. I didn’t bring my favourite ArtPen with me because, as a fountain pen, it has a tendency to go blotty after being taken on a plane because of the pressure difference. A selection of Pilot Drawing Pens will be fine for the all too short time that we’re here.

11.40 a.m.; Soft quizzical two note call of a Jay. If flies down to a shady spot then up to the branch of an olive. It eats whatever it picked up – an olive or a snail? – then wipes its bill on the branch.

Temp. 29°C, 50% cumulus

Despite the name, Woolly Trefoil, Trifolium tomentosum, is hairless but as the flowerhead grows it becomes more rounded and woolly. These plants at the car parking area were up to 20 cm (8 inches) tall with flowerheads spreading to 1 cm. It is the dominant plant on areas where limestone chippings have been spread.

I draw these spiral seed-pods alongside my sketch of trefoil flowers later, thinking that they belong to it, but they’re actually those of the appropriately named Large Disk Medick, Medicago orbicularis. It grows alongside the trefoil by a path through the olives.

12.50 p.m.; A small, hovering bee-fly, 8 mm long with a straight tongue almost as long again, like a tiny flying kiwi, visits red and white clovers.

1.40 p.m., Benitses Taverna; A large black bumble-bee with blue on it’s rear end has a different, more direct flight to our bumbling varieties. It’s a Carpenter Bee, perhaps Xylocopa violacea.

The Canary Island Date Palm, Phoenix canariensis, introduced and planted widely around the Mediterranean, has inedible fruits.

I’m trying to get in holiday mood, so I feel that I should be trying media that I wouldn’t normally use for my regular work so I did try starting to draw the palm with an Artline ErgoLine Calligraphy Pen with a 2 millimetre nib, a pen that my illustrator friend John Welding is experimenting with at the moment. He gave me this one to try out but the unfamiliar feel made it seem a bit awkward for me, so again, as with the pencil, I went back to my everyday media.

Some day I will experiment! But I’m only here for a week and there is so much to draw so I need to get on with it in reassuringly familiar pen and watercolour wash. At least I drew the palm in pencil rather than ink!

Not so easy to identify when you see it in the water when its legs are hidden, this gull closely resembles our Herring Gull but, as we would have seen immediately if it had been standing on the rocks by the harbour, it’s actually a Yellow-legged Gull, a familiar species in the Mediterranean.

The Beech Marten, Martes foina, was, as many of them unfortunately are, a roadside casualty. It was about the size of a slim, small cat.

This Whinchat was perching on a wire by the substantial ruins of the Roman baths on the slope behind the sea-front properties at Benitses.

Fern Grass

IT’S SO GOOD to have the time to sit and draw whatever I feel like drawing. I don’t aim to try to identify every flower, I’m happy just to get an impression of the Mediterranean flora. The grassy car parking area right outside our apartment is a good place to start. Because it had been wet here before we arrived it’s overdue for mowing, so that gives me a chance to take a close look at the commoner species, such as this distinctive grass, named Fern-Grass because of the shape of its seed-heads.

A grey brown locust was sunning itself on the pavement next to a similar looking twig. Either it had chosen to rest alongside it to provide camouflage or it had homed in on it in a search for another of its kind.

We saw the locust only once as we walked along the sea front pavement into the village but we always saw lizards sunbathing on the paving stones.

A lizard, 20 cm long, scurried up the wall of the ruins of the Roman baths in Benitses. It hid behind a clump of plant growing from a crack in the wall with only its long narrow tail hanging down giving it away.

The cigareli that we had as a starter this evening are spiced green leaves. A cigar is a cylinder of tobacco leaves so cigareli are small leaves. Penelope the waitress tells us that they aren’t cabbage or spinach, they’re leaves that you can find growing in the hills but also in olive groves and in gardens. We spotted some growing in a vegetable garden and they looked like what we’d call mixed salad leaves. She tells us that they’re available only at this time of the year.

P is for Pi

We’re eating at the Paxinos restaurant in Benitses which specialises in fresh fish dishes. It gets its name because it is run by people from Paxos, a small island to the south of Corfu. I’m intrigued by the name printed on the table cloths and I copy it into my sketchbook. When it’s pointed out to me it should have been obvious to me what it says; it’s the name of the restaurant;

The A, I, N and O are as they would be in English. The Σ, sigma or S and the X are very different to our own letters but the one I should have recognised is the initial letter; π, pi is our P, the Greek letter used in Pythagorus to represent the proportion of the circumference of a circle to its radius.

Fireflies

Although after the first night that we saw them I wrote that the ‘fireflies’ we saw on our walk back to the apartments were ‘yellowish white not greenish like a glow-worm’, we later decided that this was an optical illusion. They really did produce a greenish light but because this flashed on for such a brief moment the impression that stayed with you was of the after image. If you stare at a greenish light then the after image that you’re left with is red. I think that the ‘yellowish white’ we were seeing was the impression left by the brief but brilliant green flash.

On one occasion we spotted one of the ‘fireflies’ on the pavement. It was a beetle, about 1 cm long. With our British glow-worms it’s the female who produces the light, to advertise her presence to the male but she is wingless, so the Corfu ‘fireflies’ must be a different species. I wouldn’t like to guess whether it was the males or the females that we were seeing.

We never saw the bird (or toad) that made the ‘sonar blip’ noise but because of the variety of places that we heard it we’re convinced that it was a Scops Owl. I’ve shown it with twin peaks in my imagined sonagraph. Sometimes the male and the female call and reply to each other in a duet. BUT the Midwife Toad, which occurs on Corfu, sounds like a Scops Owl.

And, to confuse things still further, the Green Toad sounds like a cicada. We could hear something like a cicada but not as continuous coming from where a water course passes through the grounds of the apartments.

The next evening it was warmer and stiller and we saw lots of bats on our walk back from the restaurant.

Bluebells

I WOULDN’T have thought that a south-west-facing bank below a quarry face would be ideal for Bluebells but they’re growing like weeds on this slope by Addingford Steps. Although they’re a woodland plant they don’t do well in full shade.

Spring goes by so quickly and each year I find myself missing out on drawing woodland flowers so, as I’m walking back this way anyway, I decide to give myself half an hour drawing the flowers on a mossy bank between the railway and a derelict railway embankment.

This can’t be ancient woodland but the dark soil appears to be rich in leaf mould. The Bluebells here are growing beneath small Ash trees. Brambles run through the herb layer without dominating the habitat by forming a dense tangle. There are a lot of seedlings with bright green toothed leaves which I guess are Himalayan Balsam.

House-hunting Bee

As I’m drawing, a Red-tailed Bee lands on a bare patch of soil and starts digging. It turns around and pushes soil out of its thimble-sized excavation. Three minutes later it cleans its fur by rubbing with front and back legs but it then gives up on the hole.

It flies a short distance further up the bank and I photograph it at work, but after a few minutes it gives up on that hole too. I assume that this is a young queen which has recently emerged and that it’s prospecting for a suitable bank in which to start a new colony.

Broad Buckler Fern

One fern looks very much like another but I know that something to take a closer look at is the colour of the scales on the stem, if there are any. These had a dark brown streak along the centre with pale margins, so this is Broad Buckler Fern, Dryopteris filix-mas, a common fern of woods, hedgerows and shaded rocky ledges.

I recently bought a Victorian book, Ferns of Great Britain, by Anne Pratt, so I checked out the species in it. I was surprised that, despite that traditional sounding name of ‘Broad Buckler’, at that time it then went under the name of Broad Prickly-toothed or Crested Fern, and had a different genus name; Lastréa instead of Dryopteris.

Although the streaked scales are described in the text, they aren’t shown as streaked in this illustration.

The illustration is credited to ‘W. Dickes del et sc.’. ‘Del. et sc. is an abbreviation for ‘delineavit et sculpsit’, meaning ‘drew and engraved’.

Much as I like Victorian natural history books, they wouldn’t be of much use as field guides. An attached poem doesn’t really help with identity but it does evoke the Victorian attitude to natural history:

“The feathery Fern ! the feathery Fern !
It groweth wild, and it groweth free,
By the rippling brook, and the dimpling burn,
And the tall and stately forest tree ;
Where the merle and the mavis sweetly sing,
And the blue jay makes the woods to ring,
And the pheasant flies on whirring wing,
Beneath a verdurous canopy.”

The merle and the mavis are the Blackbird and Song Thrush. I don’t hear them today but there’s a Chiff-chaff singing almost continuously and, briefly, a Wren.

Ground Ivy

Three members of the mint family, the Labiates, that I tend to get mixed up are Bugle, Skullcap and Ground Ivy, so I draw this plant by the path side with some care. It’s Ground Ivy, Glechoma hederacea, a common plant of woods, hedges and disturbed ground. It is softly hairy and, according to the field guide, smells strongly when crushed. I must try crushing a leaf next time I see it.

Periwinkle

Periwinkle growing in the hawthorn hedge.

THE NEW POND has become disputed territory and there’s a continuing battle between rival Blackbirds. Not only does the sparkling new pond serve as a prominent landmark, it’s also a valuable resource for nesting materials. A female Blackbird appeared to be gathering mud from between rocks we’ve put around the pond to anchor the liner. The mud cup in a Blackbird’s nest is further lined with dry grasses.

The Blue Tits are popping in and out of the nest box but we saw a large bumblebee fly to the hole and crawl inside, so I wonder who will end up in possession.

To the left of the pond I originally tried to create a bog area but I could never get it to work in practice and it never became anything in particular, just whatever became established which might include teasel and hosta but was just as likely to include bramble and hogweed, both of which have their value for wildlife but they can begin to take over.

We’ve levelled the area off ready for turfing, ideally with a wild flower lawn turf, but until we roll that out the House Sparrows are enjoying dust-bathing in the finely raked soil.

I started this mainly wildlife sketchbook in May last year. Hopefully I'll be well into my next wildlife sketchbook by May this year.

It was cooler than I expected this afternoon as I sat in the sun drawing the Periwinkle growing near the rhubarb at the foot of the hedge but it made me feel as if I was at last getting my life where I want it to be. Instead of constructing ponds, creating raised beds and weeding, it is at last getting to the stage where I can relax a bit and just enjoy being out there. Hopefully my sketchbook will start to reflect the arrival of spring.

Spring Flowers

BLACKTHORN is now in blossom, buds are swelling on the trees and in the park the first tulips join the squill and crocus that are already in flower. Rosettes of familiar looking leaves, perhaps sowthistle or Nipplewort,are turning car park edges green. If the weeds have started growing that’s a reminder that we should start sowing vegetables.

Gorse has been in flower on Storrs Hill for a month or more. This morning a Kestrel hovers above the field below the scarp, using the updraft from the slope.