Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
It’s not too early in the year to start some botanical drawings and I’ve learnt something even from drawing florist’s tulips: not all those ‘petals’ are actually petals. Tulips normally have three petals and, surrounding them, three sepals. Sepals are leaflike and enclose the flower.
Garden designer Jack Wallington and Wakefield artist Helen Thomas launched the ‘Dandelion and Double Yellows – Your Gallery’ online gallery at Wakefield’s Festival of the Earth yesterday.
Dandelions and Double Yellows – Your Gallery at Creative Wakefield
‘Always draw with movement from the elbow or shoulder, never from the wrist’ was the advice that I read in a book on illustrating graphic novels recently. So that’s where I’ve been going wrong all these years. I’ve always had shaky hands so drawing from the wrist rather than the fingers is usually about as free as I get. For this geranium I made a point of moving my whole arm, so it helped that we were sitting in a cafe table and I could steady my arm by resting it on the table.
I didn’t find it so easy when I was kneeling, clutching my little A6 Hahnemuhle Watercolour Book, beside one of the beds in the walled garden at Sewerby Hall, drawing a red admiral on what I think was Hylotelephium telephium, a relative of the sedums. I find it impossible to sit in a crosslegged yoga pose, so kneeling is the best I can do.
Hoverflies were also attracted to the flowers and basked in the sun on the surrounding box edging.
Reading up on comic strips and graphic novels makes me more aware of the stylisation that we’re familiar with in everyday life. Looking closely at this apostle teaspoon, part of the mismatched cutlery and crockery at Hilary’s in Cawthorne, I could see that someone had designed him with the sort of stylish simplification that you’d put into designing a character in a manga or comic strip story. He could appear as the ‘wise old man’ mentor for some hero, like Alec Guinness’s Obi-Wan Canobi in Star Wars.
‘You have much to learn, Grasshopper!’ would be a suitable aphorism for the Apostle-spoon character if he was admonishing me for my inability to adopt the lotus position, but it was actually Master Po’s line to David Carridine’s trainee monk in the 1970s television series, Kung Fu.
My mum had some teaspoons with Egyptian characters on them and I hope that I managed to keep one when we cleared her house. Now I’m thinking could they have come back with my dad from Egypt after the war. I don’t ever remember asking my mum about the story behind them.
A small tortoiseshell rests on the seed head of wild carrot on a track between lagoons at RSPB St Aidan’s nature reserve. Our cultivated carrots are varieties of the same species, Daucus carota.
After flowering the stems of the umbel curve inwards as the seeds develop.
The seeds are armed with combs of hook-tipped bristles, ready to attach to any passing animal.
2.30 p.m., 71℉, 22℃, 100% low grey cloud, slight breeze: I’m taking a break drawing the tumbling knapweed overhanging the pond. Two or three bumblebees work the flowers joined by a green-veined white butterfly.
This morning I had a summer pruning session on the Golden Hornet crab apple, which hasn’t been trimmed for almost two years. As soon as I’d finished, three or four blue tits appeared, foraging amongst the newly exposed clusters of twigs, left where I’ve trimmed off the long, slimmer newer growth.
‘Summer prune for fruit,’ said Monty Don on a recent Gardeners’ Word, ‘winter prune for growth.’
Following on from the blue tits, a sparrowhawk swoops through the crab apple, now able to fly right through the opened up centre of my goblet-shaped tree. It perches for a few seconds, then it’s off across the next garden. It’s small and brown, so we think that it’s an immature female.
On our walk around Carr Gate, near Wakefield, yesterday, fat-hen, a common weed, was growing on a grass verge alongside a slip road and perennial sowthistle at the side of the track by a small wood.
Fat-hen, Chenopodium album, is in the goosefoot and orache family. The similar-looking common orache also grows as a weed in similar habitats and is also typical of open ground by the sea, so it can be found on roadside verges which get salt spray from de-icing.
As the lockdown eased at the beginning of February, I couldn’t resist buying a packet of Spencer Mixed sweet pea seeds to sow indoors on my desk in the studio. I set them off in toilet roll tubes but as I was using garden soil from the greenhouse they had a bit of competition from seedlings of chickweed and sowthistle growing up amongst them.
The sweet peas were drawn with an Apple Pencil on my iPad in Clip Studio Paint, using the ‘Wet Blotting Ink’ brush for adding the colour. The brothers above (one morphing in a Pokemon character) were drawn in the iPhone version of Fresco, using a Bamboo stylus, as, so far, you can’t used the Apple Pencil on an iPhone screen.
The house across the road is another iPhone Fresco drawing, this time using Fresco’s appropriately named ‘Grungy Inker’ pen. I wonder if a matt-surfaced screen protector would make drawing with a stylus on an iPhone more controllable.
It’s the last day to take part in Plantlife’s ‘Every Flower Counts’ follow-up survey, in my case to see how our front lawn has progressed since its last mowing at the end of ‘No-mow May’.
In my randomly chosen square metre there are just 9 white clover flowerheads, most of them already partially going to seed, so my nectar score is a little disappointing:
But it is a lot better than my ‘No Mow May’ score because a handful white clover flowerheads can produce more nectar than the 75 germander speedwell flowers that I counted last month so the lawn is producing 10 milligrams of nectar per square metre, an improvement on the 1.7 at the end of May, and the whole lawn can potentially support 13 bees, up from 2 in the last survey.
The horseshoe geranium, more accurately known as the zonal pelargonium, is a hybrid species whose wild ancestors grew in Mediterranean climate zones. Because it wasn’t suited to surviving our winters, gardeners used to keep it going through the winter as stem cuttings. This can mean the expense of heating a greenhouse and there is the possibility of plants being susceptible to virus, so it’s more usual these days to grow it from seed.
Our neighbour has grown some this year and gave us this plant as a small seedling. It wasn’t too happy growing on our kitchen windowsill and its leaves turned red. We’ve discovered this was probably because it was getting too cold at night. It’s thriving now though in its small pot. Apparently if you give them too large a pot, they put their efforts into vegetative growth instead of flowering.
The flowers have no scent but the leaves have a pungency that reminds me of dustiness. This probably dates back to my childhood experience of geraniums, which were often leggy plants growing on dusty windowsills in primary schools.
The cold hasn’t just affected our indoor geranium: the sweet peas have been very slow to start flowering and the three stems in this bottle are the first we’ve picked.
Helen Thomas’s paintings at the opening of her Dandelions and Double Yellows show at Wakefield Cathedral celebrate street flowers, such as the willowherb, sow thistle and Oxford ragwort that I spotted at Bank House on Burton Street.
We were on our way to the Museum at Wakefield One to take a look at another inspiring exhibition, also opening this weekend, which brings to life the letters of Charles Waterton in a suitably Victorian combination of paper craft and magic lantern show, with narration and readings by Sir David Attenborough, Sir Michael Palin, Chris Packham, Liz Bonnin and Waterton Discovery Centre countryside ranger, Dave Mee.
