Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
I always slip my Olympus Tough camera into my pocket when I set out to work in the garden and, even before I’d started repotting plants in the greenhouse, I noticed these zig-zag patterns on the seed tray I was using.
They look like the marks left by a snail scraping away a film of algae from the surface of the tray.
Probably one of the garden snails that I’ve evicted from the greenhouse on several occasions.
Of course I’ll draw them when they’re in flower, but I like foxgloves at this stage, with the cluster of flower buds beginning to unfurl.
My company as I draw this on my wild flower patch at the end of the garden includes a female sparrow picking over the wood chip path, a blackbird singing behind me over the hedge, a dunnock giving its hurried trill and a jumping spider checking out my legs. I’m wearing shorts so I can track its progress over my hairy legs without looking up from my drawing, so I miss its daring leap from knee to knee.
The rosette of leaves at the foot of the plant also makes an interesting subject. But I will draw those flowers as they appear over the next few weeks.
With ‘No Mow May’ drawing to a close, it’s time to count the flowers that have sprung up on our front lawn. I throw a small chunk of wood over my shoulder to randomly select my square metre sample.
Results: 8 daisies, 2 common mouse-ear and 75 germander speedwell flowers.
Plantlife calculate that, taking this as an average for my 14.4 square metre lawn, the flowers are producing 1.7 milligrams of nectar per square metre, enough to support 2 bees across the entire lawn.
Let’s hope that I can improve on that with next year’s ‘Every Flower Counts’ survey.
My peppers are more than ready for potting on but I wanted to draw this Sun Spurge, Euphorbia helioscopia, now going to seed, before I do that. I took the soil for the peppers from the greenhouse, so it’s not surprising that this sprouted. Spurge ‘bribes’ ants to disperse its seed by tempting them with oil-rich attachments – elaiosomes – which the ants or their larvae eat before discarding the seed.
Like all euphorbias, as a deterrent to herbivores, the Sun Spurge has milky, latex sap that can cause irritation.
This is not the ideal way to grow peppers. I took some seed from a red pepper in early spring, dried it, then planted it in garden soil from the greenhouse. First to germinate were garden weeds, mainly chickweed but also red deadnettle, spurge and what I think is nipplewort.
The pepper seedlings are now looking yellow and undernourished, so it’s time for me to pot them on and give them a chance to grow, flower and fruit.
We had so many nights of frost last month that we’re leaving it until the last possible moment to plant our runner beans. Having lost tomatoes to the frost down in the greenhouse, we’re keeping these on the kitchen windowsill, just in case. They’re visibly growing every day.
The daisies are hardly bothering to open up on such a cool dull morning but at least I don’t get a spot of rain until the end of my brief sketching session as Barbara and her brother John make their three-circuit – one mile – exercise walk around the park. A man, accompanied by his young son on a bike, has set himself the target of four miles: twelve times around Illingworth Park.
It rains properly in the afternoon, which our garden really needs after such a dry April. Hopefully we’ll now get a bit of warmth and things will burst into life.
Leave your lawn unmown for the month of May and let the flowers bloom on your lawn. Then, at the end of the month, find out how many bees your lawn can feed with our Every Flower Counts Survey.
Plantlife Every Flower Counts survey
Well that’s all the persuasion that I need, it’s got to be worth a try, although we might need a mown path across our back lawn to get to the veg beds and to hang out the washing.
I am of course a bit biased and I even think of garden weeds as wild flowers, however troublesome, so I’m not the one to judge when it comes to a dilemma between tidy management and wild & free.
“What do you think of the change from strimming to using herbicides?” I ask a couple from the allotments alongside the park.
The man with the barrow isn’t convinced: “They’ve gone along the fence, but we’ve got bindweed down there, you think that was what needed doing.”
“We used to grow a blackberry along the fence,” adds the woman, “so people could pick the berries on the other side, but they said that we’d be liable if anyone was ill, so they’ve taken it out.”
At first when I saw rings of dead grass around posts and litter bins, I blamed the local dogs, but it’s the result of the council making the change to spraying as an alternative to the expensive business of strimming around obstacles – which can be damaging to young trees.
I know how long it takes me to edge the lawn and to try and stop the chicory in our little meadow area taking over the paths and veg beds in the immediate vicinty, so I can imagine the scale of the problem of keeping things tidy over the whole Metropolitan District.
Plantlife is celebrating the way Wakefield and eight other councils are leading the way in better managing their road verges for wildlife, so I’m sure that the strimming versus herbicides dilemma has been carefully thought out, but however environmentally friendly the herbicide is that they’re using, there’s a lot of it being applied and inevitably there must be some impact on biodiversity.
Every Flower Counts, Plantlife
A Red deadnettle, Lamium purpureum, has sprung up in a pot of soil taken from the greenhouse, growing more luxuriantly than the sweet peppers that I’d sown. It’s one of the first garden weeds to emerge at the start of the season.
So far this month, there’s been an air frost somewhere in the UK every night. It’s also been one of the driest Aprils on record, so it’s not surprising that, compared with last year, things are a bit behind. For instance, the kingcups by our pond have only just put out their first flowers today.
Harlow Carr RHS Gardens was originally the trial grounds for the Northern Horticultural Society, who chose a site on the edge of the Dales to ensure that any plant that could survive here would do well anywhere in the in the North.
Harlow Carr is the furthest that we’ve travelled since mid-autumn. We feel that it’s time for us to get out to different places again.
The yellow hooded spadix flower heads of skunk cabbage are bursting into life on the banks of the beck that flows through the gardens.
As we continue under high pressure, it’s been cold – sometimes down to below freezing on a night – and very dry. That hasn’t been a problem for the spurge, growing in my wild flower patch at the bottom of the garden. I guess that the milky, corrosive sap must work well as an anti-freeze and is perhaps one of the reasons that spurges do well in dry habitats, for instance in the dry, sometimes dusty, soil in the raised bed in our greenhouse.
It isn’t the most popular of plants with pollinators: during the hour or so that I’m drawing I notice only two insect visitors, both small flies, one a species of hoverfly. The small bumble bee in my sketch was working its way around the flowerhead of a dandelion.
We’re on coal measures rocks, so mainly shales and sandstones, which usually weather into slightly acid soils.
The foxglove is typical of dry acid soils and it self-seeds and thrives amongst our flower borders and veg beds so, as a change from trying to establish a patch of traditional English meadow on my wild flower patch, I’m going with the flow and planting out the foxglove seedlings transplanted from where they’ve sprung up to create a woodland edge habitat.