Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
As I was trimming the hawthorn at the end of the garden this morning, I found this gall on a stem growing in the top of the hedge. I think that it’s a species of rust fungus, so the tufts are the spore-producing bodies.
It looks as if the stem might have been bent over and damaged along one side, allowing the fungus to penetrate the periderm: the corky outer layer of the stem.
As I was weeding the bottom veg bed this morning, this common toad wandered along past me, heading for the greenhouse. I persuaded it to go back towards the shade and shelter of the compost bins.
To get to the veg bed, I’d trimmed a path along the edge of my meadow. I then continued alongside the hedge to the bench in the far corner. I was all set to trim back the whole meadow but as I started on the long grass in the shade of the hedge at the bottom of the garden I started coming across a lot of wildlife: two frogs hopping away from me, one white plume moth and a drone fly.
I’m leaving that area for the wildlife apart from snipping off the tops of the chicory, which I’m trying to keep in check to give other wild flowers a chance.
The first of the month seems like a good time to try to get back to drawing from nature, even if that’s just fifteen minutes by the duck pond while Barbara, her sister and brother take a walk around the walled garden here in Thornes Park. When the resting Canada goose eventually got up, it limped along awkwardly, struggling to drag along its left leg. Even though it had stayed put as people walked within yards of it, it was continually looking around, so I found myself drawing its head from three different angles. As usual, adding a bit of watercolour helped bring things together as I picked out one of the outlines.
Adding the chocolate brown to the black-headed gull sketches also makes a difference, as did adding a wash of light grey – raw umber and french ultramarine – for its back.
2 p.m., Broad beans and rainbow chard are doing well in the bed at the back of the car park by the Cluntergate Community Centre, Horbury. The blue flowers of borage are attracting a hoverfly.
As I draw, I can hear the clack of heels in the centre as couples dance to what sounds like a karaoke version of ‘Putting on the Style’. As I sit on the corner of an old stone wall, I’m attracting attention because I’m NOT moving:
‘Are you all right?’ A woman asks me.
‘Fine, thank you.’ I reply, trying to work out if it’s someone that I know.
‘I was watching you and you weren’t moving’, she explains, ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’
I’m so pleased with our potato patch. I usually try to cram in more than recommended to save space in the veg beds. This year I gave them the recommended space, which meant that I was able to earth them up when the first shoots appeared. I was expecting small new potatoes but two of these would be large enough to bake. As far as I remember, they’re a variety of Maris. They have red markings and the flesh is white and doesn’t fall in the water (i.e. start to disintegrate) when you boil them.
Another success that is that I’ve managed to grow a lot of Calendulas for free. There were perhaps two hundred little seedling clustered around where a single self-sown plant had grown last year. I grew them on by planting them in rows in the veg bed and I’ve since moved them on to any space that needs filling, in the border, the raised bed and even around the runner beans in the veg beds.
Thinking ahead to our apple crop, I’ve made a start on thinning out the little apples to just two per cluster. Both cordon apples – the golden spire and howgate wonder – suffered from leaf curl this spring but they seem to be recovering and hopefully we’ll have as good a crop as we had last year.
Borrowing scenery is a theme in Japanese gardens, Monty Don explained in the second of two films on BBC2 yesterday. Because of the topography of the country, space is usually limited, so skilful planting and pruning can give the impression that a garden extends to the trees on the slope beyond. Presenting gardens as a work of art, the experience of strolling along paths through cloud-pruned shrubs or crossing stepping-stones might feel like browsing through a scroll painting of mountain, river and forest. Alternatively, a particular, carefully constructed view might be framed by the open wall of teahouse – a picture window on a grand scale – as if it were a single painting.
My niece Sarah and husband Will have managed something similar in their orangery extension on the back of the house. It’s been almost like summer today so we had the windows wide open with a view of three wood pigeons relaxing in the trees beyond the garden fence. Drawing them, with a pot of tea and a bacon sandwich to keep me going, thank you for that Sarah, as we caught up with my brother and his wife, made for a suitably English take on the Japanese zen garden ideal of contemplating nature from the calm surroundings of a teahouse. Calm because of I refused my great nephew Zach’s offer to act as goalie for him.
The three wood pigeons didn’t seem to have any pressing business to attend to. I’d noticed a wood pigeon this morning twisting a twig from the top branches of a silver birch but these three weren’t in nest-building mode. One of them indulged in a relaxed preening routine the other two just sat hunched up close to each other, watching the world go by.
The birds on our feeders are having a hard time with the sparrowhawk swooping in regularly and this character, a neighbour’s cat with a bushy tail, lurking in the flower bed. Even the pheasants keep their distance when the cat is around, although they don’t seem too concerned about the sparrowhawk.
First visitor to our new sparrow nest box: a blue tit. It checks out hole number three first; no, that’s not quite right; then hole number two and it’s just about to investigate hole number one when a second blue tit appears, there’s a skirmish and off they fly.
It’s likely that, as this RSPB box was made specifically for sparrows, the blue tits will find the entrance hole a little too wide for their liking but the old box, single-holed variety, attracted blue tits one year, sparrows the next (and finally bumblebees), so we’ll have to wait until springtime to find out who finally takes possession.
A cold front came in from the north during the night and today it’s noticeably cooler but mostly sunny.
Armed with secateurs, long-handled loppers, a step-ladder and a pruning saw, I trim back the golden hornet crab apple to a more manageable shape. It’s mainly a case of cutting back the whip-like vertical shoots that have grown since I last cut it back a year ago but I put in a bit of extra effort and use a pruning saw on one branch that’s managed to get its twiggy offshoots beyond my reach during the past few years.
Yes, it was a favourite look-out post for the resident blackbird, but it will soon find another perch. As I work at in the crown of a the tree, a long-tailed tit flits past my head and perches on a branch three feet in front of me. I don’t think it quite knows what to make of me.
After so much practice drawing on the iPad, it’s a change to get back to pen and watercolour and to sit and draw this autumnal-looking Victorian hybrid lime tree in a garden in West Melton, Wath-upon-Dearne near Rotherham.
Hopefully the small degree of planning involved in the process of drawing on an iPad is prompting me to be more methodical in my approach to drawing in general while the experience of going back to a more tactile medium – back to pen on paper – might encourage me to be a bit more spontaneous in my iPad drawings.
The original drawings are 2½ inches, 6 cm, across.
Our greenhouse has a bit of a question-mark hanging over it because we’re keen to keep getting away in the springtime, which is just at the time when we should be getting things going in there.
Last year while we were away, an earlier than expected scorching spell of weather withered the young tomato plants and they never really recovered, so it was a lot of work and watering for a few handfuls of not so brilliant tomatoes.
This spring we were away so much that we didn’t put any plants in at all but we were glad of that later when it turned out to be a record-breaking hot, dry summer. They would have struggled to survive in the searing temperatures that can build up in the greenhouse.
The drip irrigation system that I rigged up a few years ago for when we go away has never been as successful as hand-watering would have been.
Most mornings this summer it was too hot to enjoy sitting out on our southeast-facing patio, so hot that on occasion, when I sat down to put my gardening shoes on, I’d lay down my gloves on edge of patio because the paving slabs were uncomfortably hot to sit on.
We realise that we need a shady corner where we can sit out, so our plan is to dismantle the greenhouse, move the shed down there then construct a simple shelter in its place that we can use in either sun or rain.
When bought our house thirty-five years ago, we were offered the greenhouse as well (at a price of course!), so it’s going to be a wrench to let it go.
What I can’t bring myself to part with just yet is my dad’s book on The Modern Greenhouse, as I’d like to browse through it to get a bit of insight of what his ambitions were during my school and student days when he got so into growing under glass in his cedar-framed greenhouse that he had a second, leant-to, greenhouse built against the high Victorian brick wall adjacent to it.
How up-to-date the book was in 1970, I’m not sure as my dad’s copy is the fourteenth edition of a book first published in 1938 and revised only once, in 1955.
My drawing of the potting bench (top) was made on my iPad in Adobe Draw, tracing from a photograph. I’d already reduced the photograph to pure black and white but I realised that I shouldn’t be too literal as I traced it, or it wouldn’t look like a pen and brush ink drawing, so I tried to be fairly free.
Lime trees, particularly a variety of the Common Lime, Tilia X europaea, with a columnar shape, were a favourites with the Victorians and were planted in the grounds of a now-vanished villa, here in the Dearne Valley between Barnsley and Rotherham. The century-old trees were given preservation orders when new houses were built in the old walled garden.
Unfortunately, even with preservation orders, trees do eventually start to die back and one of trees here needed major surgery to keep it alive.
The nursery colony of pipistrelle bats which were resident in its cavities each year during the summer months moved to snug new quarters the following summer, in the apex of the house next door.
On Saturday evening, around 9 p.m., we watched them emerging and lost count of home many there were. I’d say well over a hundred. There would be a pause and then several would shoot out one after the other.
Some of them headed straight for the tree that had been their nursery roost, others hawked about overhead, appearing and disappearing at lightning speed in the gathering gloom above us.
We’re on coal measures here. This sandstone boulder serves as a garden feature at the foot of a still-thriving lime.