ONE OF THE reasons that babies and toddlers appear from time to time in my sketchbook is that they’re not aware that I’m drawing them, so I can sketch away without feeling that I’m being obtrusive.
It’s my mum’s birthday today so the family have gathered from as far afield as Edinburgh, Sheffield, Hull and the flat upstairs.
As we leave, we stop to say hello to that other new member of the family, Frank the Springer Spaniel. As I’m kneeling down to make a fuss of him, I’m aware of patches of white in the periphery of my vision and I start half-thinking ‘I’m surprised that there are still a few patches of snow about’. But of course it isn’t snow, it’s snowdrops, which are at their best growing in drifts alongside the back lawn at my mum’s.
THE WIND builds up again this morning, swaying the tops of the tall conifers, a Leylandii and a fir, in my mum’s back garden.
The needles of the fir are small and strap-like, each about 1.5 cm long, coming to a point at the tip. Unlike pines, where the needles grow in pairs (or in threes or fives), these grow individually from the stem.
I could see the fir’s long sausage-shaped cones growing from some of the top branches but despite the wind, I couldn’t find any on the the ground to take closer look.
The bark is smooth, pitted with pores.
Leyland Cypress
Female cone of Leylandii, diameter 1 cm, one third of an inch, photographed with the microscope.
The leaves of the Leylandii, (Leylandii) x Cupressocyparis leylandi, are scale-like. The small female cones have eight scales and the seeds (2 mm) are disk-shaped (right).
The multiple stems of this Leylandii have rough bark.
Spring Flowers
The snowdrops at my mum’s have been showing for a week or two now with yellow aconite, a relative of the buttercup coming into flower this week.
The hellebore or Christmas Rose has been in flower throughout the winter but the yellow crocus is only just showing signs of bursting into flower.
I’M GRADUALLY getting there with the drawing style for my latest book. During our weekend away I picked up a copy of Private Eye at a station bookstall as my holiday reading. It was useful to be reminded how simply drawn cartoons can make a point so successfully. Private Eye is currently celebrating 50 years of publication and during its first half century the satirical magazinehas stuck to newsprint for its pages, so they should have a pretty good idea of what works best in the medium by now.
Coming back to my drawing of Coltsfoot(top left), which I’d made a start on before we went away, I decided that I needed to simplify my design. When I’m drawing a flower from nature I like to include every detail that I see. My aim is to study the plant itself so who am I to decide what is or is not relevant.
These illustrations call for a different strategy. Real life can be confusing and I need to strip down reality to a few easily grasped essentials. Hopefully I can still catch the spirit of the subject.
Coltsfoot is a spring flower, so there’s none around for me to draw at the moment but working from a photograph was tending to make my drawing too literal. Instead, I’ve referred to a Victorian copy of Culpeper’s Herbal and tried to go for the simplicity of the coltsfoot illustrated on one of the colour plates.
Drawing a Crowd
I need to show a group of people crowding around a fire but with so many bodies blocking the view I couldn’t show the hearth itself. The tapering chimney breast isn’t typical of Victorian buildings but I felt that it gave more of a clue that the group were gathering at a fireside.
THE WILD GLADIOLUS, Gladiolus ilyricus, is a native of south and west Europe but is considered to be a native of the British Isles with a very local distribution in the New Forest where it grows on acid grass heaths. The showy variety that I’ve drawn here is a florist’s variety of the plant, perhaps the Italian Gladiolus, Gladiolus italicus, which is the one most often grown in this country. It is sometimes seen growing as a garden escape on rubbish tips.
As you might guess, the name comes from the same root as ‘gladiator’. Gladius is the Roman word for a small sword; the name refers to the shape of the leaves.
Gladioli are members of the Iris family and I can see the resemblance to Yellow Flag.
THIS RELATIVE of the dandelion grows around the edges of the lawn, mainly on the shadier side. It tends to be larger than the Autumn Hawkbit which I drew the other day. It’s leaves aren’t as narrow as those of the Hawkbit and the teeth of Cat’s-ear don’t point backwards.
Cat’s-ear, Hypochaeris radicata, is a plant of meadows, heath, dunes, lawns and roadsides, on mildly acid soils. The ‘cat’s ear’ of its name refers to the scale-like bracts on its stem.
ON THE sunnier edge of the lawn hear the flower border there’s a small colony of Autumn Hawkbit, Leontodon autumnalis, also known as Autumn Dandelion. As that name suggests, it does look like an undernourished dandelion, but then so do so many of these hawkbit/hawkweed/hawksbeard relatives of the dandelion so in this case the name Hawkbit is a good way to remember one of the differences; the narrow leaf is deeply toothed, as if a hawk has been pecking pieces out of it.
Rye Grass
Height: 13 cm
We’ve had the odd shower but it’s been so dry during the last month that we mown the lawn only once. This has allowed some of the grasses like this Perennial Ryegrass, Lolium perenne, to flower. Ryegrass is usually included in a seed-mix for a hard-wearing lawn, which our’s has to be.
North is in the top right corner and the lawn slopes gently down towards the pond. Maximum dimensions: 7.7 x 5.5 metres.
OUR LAWN wouldn’t win any prizes either as immaculate turf or as a wild flower meadow but wild flowers, weeds and garden escapes manage to find micro-habitats within the 40 square yard south-east-facing slope where they can take hold. On the worn route to the garden path by the shed, on the shadier side of the lawn, there’s a patch of White or Dutch Clover, Trifolium repens; the most luxuriant growth of moss amongst the grasses is in a flattish area near the middle of the lawn and Dog Daisy, Chrysanthemum leucanthemum, has crept in from where it originally grew in the flower border.
Height: 20 - 37 cm, diameter of flowerhead: 2.5 cm (1 inch)
Orange Hawkweed, Pilosella hieracoides, also known as Hen-and-Chickens or Fox-and-Cubs because of the way the unopened buds group around the flowers, grows at the top end of the lawn near the patio, where it’s drier and sunnier. It’s a naturalised hawkweed that grows in grassy and waste places. As it spreads by underground rhizomes and can become a weed, I had better remove the few plants that have become established during this dry summer before it takes over.
Cherry Log Fungus
‘It looks as if someone has put a dollop of mashed potato on the log!’ says Ellie; this fungus is growing on a log – the trunk of a flowering cherry – that has been left as a makeshift bench at the corner of the car park at the Denby Dale Road entrance to Thornes Park (or to be more accurate, Holmfield Park).
I didn’t get chance to draw enough of it to identify it. Some kind of bracket fungus presumably, or possibly something similar to Dry Rot.
Ellie has asked me to come along to Thornes Park to film an interview about my booklet Walks in the Rhubarb Triangle. One of the walks starts here at the statue of rhubarb at the corner of the park. The fungus provided me with a subject to draw as I waited for the film crew to arrive.
GREEK BASIL, also known as Bush Basil, Ocimum minimum, has smaller leaves than the more familiar kitchen herb Sweet Basil, Ocimum basilicum. We’re looking after a little Grecian urn of Bush Basil for a neighbour, which has started to flower (left).
Ocimum is from the Greek okimom meaning ‘aromatic herb’. Basils are members of the Labiate family; relatives of mint, thyme, woundwort and dead-nettle.
Writing about Sweet Basil Culpeper says;
‘This is the herb which all authors are together by the ears about, and rail at one another, like lawyers. Galen and Dioscorides hold it not fitting to be taken inwardly, and Chrysippus rails at it with downright Billingsgate rhetoric : Pliny and the Arabian Physicians defend it.’
From this, I guess that Culpeper had some first-hand experience of lawyers and of Billingsgate fishmongers. Basil is such an integral part of the healthy Mediterranean cuisine that today it seems inconceivable that it was ever regarded with such suspicion:
‘Mizaldus affirms, that being laid to rot in horse-dung, it will breed venomous beasts. Hilarius, a French physician, affirms upon his own knowledge, that an acquaintance of his, by common smelling of it, had a scorpion bred in his brain. . .
THE LAST of the Wakefield Naturalists’ summer field meetings; this morning we take a leisurely stroll around Walton Colliery Country Park, an area which is as botanically rich as any that I know in the area. There’s waterside, remnants of waste-ground and heathy slopes which will become woodland before too long unless they’re managed to keep their open aspect.
I’m not going to have the time to draw so I take the camera and the copy of the Collins Gem Guide to Wild Flowers which we keep in the glove box of the car. I found myself influenced by my 1972 diary illustrations in this dip pen and watercolour sketch.
When the group comes across a tricky flower half a dozen of us compare descriptions in our different field guides.
Melilot and Memory
For example we have to decide between two tall yellow members of the Peaflower Family; Ribbed Melilot and Tall Melilot. The Gem Guide points out that Ribbed has ‘hairless brown seed-pods’ while Tall has ‘downy black seed-pods’. I take a small piece home – it’s a common plant here – and photograph it under the microscope.
There are a few sparse microscopic hairs on the seed-pods but I’d hardly call these downy, so I’m plumping for Ribbed Melilot, Melilotus officinalis.
‘Officinalis’ means that this species was reputed to have a medicinal use; Culpeper tells us that ‘A plaster made of this herb boiled in mutton-suet, wax and rosin, is drawing, and good for green wounds’. He also recommends it for inflammation, tumours and as an eye drop ‘to take away the film that dims the sight’. Washing the head in distilled water of the herb will ‘strengthen the memory’.
Red Bartsia
Members of the Peaflower Family have nodules on their roots containing nitrogen-fixing bacteria. Accessing extra nutrients seems to be a theme of the plants on the grassy trackside; Red Bartsia, Odontites verna, a member of the Figwort Family, goes for a more direct approach in grabbing nutrients; it is semi-parasitic, tapping into the roots of other plants.
Fleabane
You can probably guess the use that Culpeper suggests for Common Fleabane, Pulicaria dysenterica, a plant of damp, grassy places: ‘The smell of this . . . is supposed delightful to insects, and the juice destructive to them, for they never leave it till the season of their deaths.’
Broad-leaved Helleborine
I last recorded Broad-leaved Helleborine, Epipactis helleborine, in my diary for 10 August 2000 on the nature trail at Collier Wood, the now defunct and much-missed picnic site in County Durham. None of our group remembers having seen it here at Walton Colliery Country Park before but it seems to be establishing itself as we see a second small colony of it later on our walk on a semi-shady woodland edge.
Helleborines are members of the Orchid Family.
Wild Carrot
It’s useful to go on a wild flower walk with a group because other people will point out details that you might miss. I don’t recall having noticed that some of the white umbels of Wild Carrot, Daucus carota, have a few red flowers at the centre.
Branched Bur-Reed
Branched Bur-reed, Sparganium erectum, has flower-heads that resemble a spiked medieval weapon. It’s an aquatic plant, growing in a water-filled ditch at the park amongst reedmace, Purple Loosestrife and Yellow-flag Iris (see top picture).
AFTER LAST WEEK’S big clear out, the pond is now a bit of a blank canvas. Duckweed is beginning fill in the shady corner by the shed but this Frog was resting on the sunny side of the pond, in the corner next to this Monkey Flower, Mimulus. This variety is ‘Highland Orange’. You find the plant on riversides, so I thought it would be happy with the pot standing in the water at the edge of the pond. It’s the first plant I’ve added to the pond. More important, but proving rather elusive in the garden centres that I’ve visited so far, is oxygenating pondweed. That’s the first aquatic plant that I need to get established.
Pond skaters have been attracted to the open water. There were always a few on the limited scraps of open water that remained between all the water plants before we cleared out the pond but today there are 32 gliding around on the surface.
The pond reflects the changing sky and reacts to every movement of frogs hopping in and out or birds coming to drink. It’s a shame to have had to ruthlessly cleared out so many plants but the pond is now more of a centrepiece for the garden than it was when it blended in with all the surrounding vegetation and it looked like a thicket of flag irises.
ONE OF THE reasons that babies and toddlers appear from time to time in my sketchbook is that they’re not aware that I’m drawing them, so I can sketch away without feeling that I’m being obtrusive.
As we leave, we stop to say hello to that other new member of the family, Frank the Springer Spaniel. As I’m kneeling down to make a fuss of him, I’m aware of patches of white in 
the periphery of my vision and I start half-thinking ‘I’m surprised that there are still a few patches of snow about’. But of course it isn’t snow, it’s snowdrops, which are at their best growing in drifts alongside the back lawn at my mum’s.
GREEK BASIL, also known as Bush Basil, 
