Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
Using Roger Phillips’ Weeds, a photographic guide to identify garden and field weeds, I’ve identified a dozen species springing up on the raised veg bed at the end of the garden. Forget-me-not and bush vetch didn’t get included in my short YouTube video.
Look out for the guest appearance by a tiny slug, ready and waiting for us to plant some tender juicy seedlings.
Common or field forget-me-not has hairy leaves, hence its Latin name, Myosotis arvensis, which translates as ‘mouse ear of the fields’.
Hairy bittercress, Cardamine hirsuta, reminds me of a small version of lady’s smock, Cardamine pratense. It’s one of the earliest of weeds to flower and one plant can produce 50,000 seeds.
I always think of groundsel, Senecio vulgaris, as a user friendly weed. It doesn’t have a taproot or spreading rhizomes, so you can soon clear a bed of groundsel just by pulling it up. Although it will probably soon appear again as its seeds can germinate within a week.
So far I’m struggling to identify this little weed. Possibly common whitlow grass, Erophila verna. As my drawing is is just an inch and a half across, I’ve scanned it at a higher res to show a bit more detail but I’m not drawing it with the aid of a hand lens so my slightly blurred macro photograph is better for showing details of the flowers and seed-pods.
We get several dandelion relatives in the garden. This is smooth sowthistle, Sonchus oleraceus. Note the slug that has already made itself at home in the rosette of leaves.
Sow-thistle stems ooze a milky sap when broken, so the slug must have a way of dealing with this latex.
The rainbow chard looks bedraggled but I thought that it would be worth leaving it in because, if the weather improves, it should start sprouting fresh leaves. I remove dead and nibbled leaves plus any that I don’t like the look of; the test is ‘if I saw this in a the supermarket, would I buy it?’ If the answer is no, it goes on the compost heap.
Definitely not going on the compost heap are the white rhizomes of couch grass. There are just a few blades showing so I need to dig down now before this invasive spreads any further. There are also a few rosettes of forget-me-not and opium poppy but they’re not a problem.
These hawthorn stems are at a good stage for laying, which involves cutting through most of a stem near ground level, bending it over at an angle and weaving it together with other stems and stakes driven into the ground to create a hedge with no gaps at the bottom. It won’t be very high of course but new branches will soon start sprouting upwards.
In the half hour that I spent drawing this, down in the corner of the garden beyond the greenhouse, a few wood pigeons flew over the wood and a robin hopped amongst the branches of the hawthorn.
I was concerned to see a blue tit with an injured wing, closely accompanied by another uninjured blue tit. Hope it recovers.
‘the twisted gorse on the cliff edge, twigs, like snakes, lying on the path, the bare rock, worn and showing though the path, heath hits, gorse burnt and blackened, the high overhanging hedges by the steep roads, which pinch the setting sun, mantling clouds, and the thunder, the deep green valleys and the rounded hills – and the whole structure simple and complex.’
Graham Sutherland,
Notes by the Artist, Tate Gallery, March 1953
On a walk alongside the hedge banks near the Pembrokeshire coast, Graham Sutherland came across a gap in the hedge that particularly appealed to him.
‘I may have noticed a certain juxtaposition of forms at the side of a road, but on passing the same place next time, I might look for them in vain. It was only at the original moment of seeing that they had significance for me.’
‘If at first I attempted to make pictures here on the spot,’ he recalled, ‘I soon gave this up . . . I found that I could express what I felt only by paraphrasing what I saw.’
3.30 p.m., 7ºC, 45ºF; For my hole in the hedge, on a showery afternoon, I go to the trouble of setting up my pop-up tent at the end of the garden. A robin hops into the hedge seven feet away from my and eyes me suspiciously. Perhaps because I’m so used to watching birds through the double-glazing of the patio doors, its colour seems more vivid at close range.
Also eyeing me suspiciously is the cock pheasant who strolls through the meadow, pauses at the hole in the hedge and decides that he’ll give me a wide berth.
Link: Paintings and Drawings by Graham Sutherland, Tate Gallery. In his statement, I wonder what Sutherland meant by ‘heath hits’. Perhaps a typo. In the context, I assumed that ‘steep rods’ should have read ‘steep roads’.
Snow settled yesterday evening, the first covering that we’ve had during a mild, wet winter. It brought more than the usual one or two siskins to the feeder this morning: six or more.
Snow is a strange thing to draw. In fact you hardly draw it at all, it’s mainly the white spaces that are left when you’ve drawn everything around it.
Growing on a lush mat of moss on our front lawn, this looks like one of the bonnet fungi, Mycena.
Buds of winter aconite are swelling in the flower beds in Holmfield Park.
The swiss chard is looking bedraggled but it adds some colour to the winter vegetable garden along with the five cannonball-sized red cabbages in the next bed.
There were eight blackbirds in the garden this morning. The lawn is the main gathering ground but now that the crab apples are starting to turn soft there will occasionally be one in the tree. Wood chip paths and a cotoneaster bush dripping with berries give them further foraging opportunities.
Star of the show is the ring-necked pheasant with white streaks on his crown. A female gives him the opportunity to puff himself up and display his plumage. As I add the colour, I can’t decide whether his tail coverts are grey or a very pale green. I get Barbara to take a look and we decide that the exact shade changes depending on how the fine feathers catch the light but the colour really is a sage grey-green.