Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
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.
This pellucid fly, also known as the pellucid hoverfly, obligingly sat on an umbel of hogweed as we photographed it. It’s one of Britain’s largest flies so although I hadn’t brought my DSLR and macro lens, it still made a good subject for my iPhone.
It’s larval stage lives in the nests of bees and wasps, scavenging its way through waste products but also turning carnivore eating the larvae of its hosts.
This is our first visit to the High Peak since before lockdown and we’re on our regular circular walk between Hope and Castleton.
We see are a couple of fresh-looking red admirals, half a dozen meadow browns and a blue dragonfly with a greenish thorax hawking back a forth over a little backwater pool on the bend of this stream, Peakshole Water, downstream from Castleton.
But it wasn’t just us watching insects, unknown to me as a photographed this valerian further downstream at Hope, the insects were watching us. When I downloaded the photograph I spotted this wasp, which must have been hovering within a couple of feet of me, with a ‘what are you doing?’ expression on its face. So rather like the lamb I attempted to photograph stealthily earlier on.
We’re walking rather than sitting and sketching, but I do get a chance to try out my new pen, a Lamy nexx an EF nib, as we wait for lunch at the Castle Inn.
Meadow vetchling, heath bedstraw and cocksfoot grass in the Deer Park at Wentworth Castle, artichoke, a grass-head, a multi-stemmed cypress trunk and a dead hedge in the gardens around the house.
Taken using the macro lens on my Olympus OM10-D E-10 MarkII DSLR except for the cypress, taken on my iPhone 11, as I couldn’t get the angle that I was after with the macro.
At first glance you might not suspect that Astrantia was a member of the cow parsley family, Apiaceae, but the little umbel of the flowerheads and the rosette of bracts are a clue. It’s popular with pollinators – such as this small tortoiseshell at Wentworth Castle this morning – and long-lasting, so we think that we could find a space for it in our flower border.
Growing by the entrance lodge near the war memorial at Newmillerdam Country Park, green alkanet, a native of south-west Europe, was grown in cottage gardens. The name alkanet comes from the Arabic name or henna as the plant, especially the roots, can be boiled to produce a cherry red dye, used by the Victorians in lip balm.
No Mow May is over but these dog daisies in the top corner of our back lawn have escaped the mower.
