Category: Garden

Trail Cam Fox

Testing my new Browning Strike Force Pro XD trail cam yesterday in the back garden: at night in infrared mode on red fox and in daylight on grey squirrel, juvenile blackbird and dunnocks.

We think there may be two foxes; the first, with a bushy tail appears at 10.13 p.m., then ten minutes later there’s a similar-looking fox crossing the screen and finally, at 10.26, a fox with an apparently thinner tail with a lighter tip to it appears to notice the infrared light and it heads off.

The following night we recorded no fox activity, so I hope that we haven’t put them off with the infrared.

Parasol

mushroom
mushroom

These parasol mushrooms were growing in a small troop in a corner of our friends, Matthew and Tonia’s, back garden in Ossett, who’ve recently cut back shrubs to rejuvenate a shady bed by an old stone wall.

I remember that back, in the 1980s, Matthew attempted to remove the large stump of what I think had been a diseased elm from this corner, but in the end he had to bury it and leave it where it was, so these could be fungi associated with rotting wood.

To me it looks like one of the agarics, some of which are good to eat, others deadly poisonous. I should have taken a closer look at the gills.

Wood Pigeon Selfies

trail cam photo

Time to test my new trail cam by positioning it below the bird feeders and sprinkling a few crumbs and mealworms on the lawn.

wood pigeon photos
dunnock

The wood pigeon took 36 selfies and even photobombed the dunnock’s brief appearance.

Also captured on camera, a blackbird, house sparrow and what we think was a song thrush.

Next test is on the video setting through the night . . .

blackbird

A Corner of the Meadow

sketchbook page

3.50 p.m., 91℉, 34℃ in direct sun, which is filtered through a veil of cloud with lower cumulus coming in from the south-east: A small hoverfly is fascinated by the lime green top of my pen and explores it as I draw.

blackbird

A blackbird is softly scolding and a female sparrow eyes me warily from the hedge.

my little meadow area
My small meadow area, next to the revamped compost bins, has been rather neglected this summer but it’s getting nearer to what I want. On this small scale I’m now aiming to put in plenty of plants for pollinators and manage those as the seasons go by, rather than attempt to create a traditional hay meadow.

Most unusual sighting is two Typhoons flying over, turning about on manoeuvre.

Knapweed

knapweed
Blue tit

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.’

sparrowhawk

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.

Maris Peer

drawing potatoes

Just harvested half a row – that’s two or three feet across our raised beds – of Maris Peer second early potatoes and decided they’d be a suitable subject for attempting to draw with a Canada goose quill.

quill and feather ink and wash drawing of Maris Peer potatoes.

I tried using the feathered end of one of the quills to add the wash. This is Noodler’s Black Ink.

I’ve been reading books on Hokusai and Quentin Blake, who was one of the tutors during my time on the Illustration course at the Royal College of Art. Birds feature a lot in Blake’s work and he’ll sometimes use a feather to draw and paint with.

Red-tailed Bumblebee

Red-tailed bumblebee

No prizes for guessing that this is a red-tailed bumblebee, Bombus lapidarius, but it’s different to a regular worker, as this is a male, with a yellow collar and cap and a foxy-coloured ‘tail’ that’s more orange-red than scarlet. On a dull afternoon at Wrenthorpe on Friday, it was doing what drones do best, hanging around taking a break on our friends’ herbaceous border alongside another equally unmotivated male.

The Nectar Thief

bumblebee on salvia

At Cannon Hall garden centre, this bumblebee was busy visiting the flowers of a salvia but instead of entering the flower in the usual way it was using the back entrance, checking out those holes nibbled in the back of the flower and bypassing the stamens and stigmas. It occasionally paused, apparently to do a bit of nibbling itself, perhaps to enlarge an existing hole or start another.

Grapevine

grapevine

At Hilary’s Village Store in Cawthorne we sit under a vine laden with bunches of small green grapes. We’re told that this vine is a cutting from a desert grape grown in a large south-facing greenhouse in Scotland. There the grapes were edible – although they were best eaten outside in the garden so that you could spit out the seeds – but here, outside and north-facing, they’re not going to ripen enough.

scone

However we didn’t come here for the grapes, in a village tea garden it had to be cream scones with our lattes.

Link

Hilary’s @ Cawthorne

The Nature of Lawns

My sketchbook spread of found objects picked up on a lawn has an autumnal feel. We’re not quite there but on a dull August day there’s a feeling that the end of summer is looming.

Fine rain this morning picked out orb webs with glistening droplets.

sketches of lime leaf, snail shell and feathers

I started this page at a family get-together yesterday afternoon in West Melton, near Rotherham, in a garden with several lime trees, planted in Victorian times. There were hundreds, probably thousands, of the limes’ helicopter seeds strewn over the lawn but so far not many leaves. This green heart-shaped leaf may have been torn off the tree in recent high winds but, because of the prominent damage, I wonder if the tree deliberately jettisoned it in an attempt to rid itself of whatever herbivore was starting to nibble holes in it.

Sketches of bluebell seedpods, dandelion seedhead, apple leaf and snail.

The robust bluebell stem with upward-facing seedpods is probably Spanish bluebell, which was often planted in gardens but which has naturalised and in some places threatens to oust our native species.

Wood pigeon feather

Sweet Peas

sweet peas
sweet peas

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.

iPhone sketches
Drawing of house in Adobe Fresco

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.