Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
Caught on my Browning ProXD trail cam last night at 11.30 pm, this fox slinks into view on the path by the veg beds, pauses briefly to take a look at the camera and at something at the opposite side of the garden, then it trots off towards the crab apple.
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.
From the trail cam footage, it looks as if we’ve got a pair of wrens roosting. Last year when there was snow on the ground we estimated somewhere between 7 and 11 wrens roosting, all in the nestbox on the left. The nestboxes don’t connect on the inside.
As they settled down there was a lot of flitting between all three holes and the pair seemed particularly interested in the middle hole but they eventually settled on the hole on the left to roost.
The last we see of the wrens on the trail cam is at 7.33 am when one of the wrens appears in the left hand hole and appears to be preparing to leave.
The blue tit arrives an hour later and makes a careful inspection of the first two nest holes, but doesn’t go in.
The roosting wrens are back, but how many of them are now crowding into the nestbox on the patio each evening? I’ve set up the trail cam, precariously mounted on a gorilla pod attached to Barbara’s dad’s cultivator which is fixed in the patio parasol stand, which itself it standing on the patio table.
Hope it works. At least my camera hasn’t put them off because as I write this just after sunset, Barbara tells me the wrens have already started to appear.
Drawn on my iPad in Clip Studio Paint, colour by the Clip Studio ‘colorize’ option. Not as camouflaged as the actual camera, but the cultivator does have orange prongs.
Birthday card for an archaeologist/organic gardener. Based on actual events (no, not the bit where Prof. Roberts identifies the variety of potato).
Moral: always let the guy who’s doing the rotavating where you’ve planted the potatoes.
3.02 pm: A sparrowhawk swoops around the bird feeder, perches in the crab apple for a moment, then flies off without catching anything.
Early afternoon snow, an after effect of yesterday’s Storm Arwen, covers the seed heads of the plant formerly known as Sedum, now Hylotelephium spectabile. A female blackbird and dunnock forage beneath the feeders which attract great tits and blue tits, a coal tit and a nuthatch.
The snow soon starts to melt and these cyclamen, in the bed beside the patio beneath the cordon apples, look none the worse for it.
We had seven or eight Howgate Wonder cooking apples from our double cordon by the patio this year, enough to stew to add to our porridge for a week or two.
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.
I promise this is the final instalment in my vegetable trilogy: vine-ripened tomatoes. And these were supermarket grown, although I’m hoping we’ll still have some ripening in the greenhouse into next month.