Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
The hybrid limes in the Victorian gardens of Horbury are now in fresh green leaf and the apples are in blossom.
This blossom is a variety called James Grieve which is a cooker at the start of the season, an eater as it gets sweeter towards the end.
The compass and the cinema-goer were drawn in odd moments this week.
The wild is calling me and I’m back in my tent for the first time in two years.
Admittedly I’ve only gone as far as our back lawn and pitched it overlooking the pond. The weather is fine and I don’t really need this little pop-up igloo of a tent but I need to practice putting it up and – the trickier part – folding it up and getting it back in its dustbin-lid sized bag
When I first bought it, I was glad of it when drawing rocks on the beach at Whitby. It rained quite heavily but I was able to finish my drawing from the shelter of the tent however I could not work out how to roll/fold it up again.
The life-guards of West Cliff, a helpful family by the Whalebone Arch, even a tattooed man who looked as if he’d be an expert at striking camp after a music festival were unable to help me and we drove home with the half-folded tent, like a restless Chinese New Year dragon, springing about in the boot.
This afternoon, for the first time ever, I folded it up in one go. The secret is not to try and understand how it folds up – that’s multi-dimensional thinking that would baffle Stephen Hawkings – you’ve just got to start rolling the naan bread-shaped collapsed tent from bottom to top and you’ll find yourself flanked by two small bicycle wheel-sized butterfly wings which you concertina into the bag, being careful to tuck in any overlapping canvas between the hoops so you don’t catch it in the zip fastening of the bag.
I look forward to using it again as I’m convinced that after six or seven years I’ve finally got the hang of it.
Violets grow like weeds at my mum’s house, in the borders around the edge of the lawn. It’s a long time since I sat out drawing in the front garden at Smeath House and I’d forgotten how peaceful it is here. Three rival blackbirds are singing from corners of the shrubbery. The variegated beech tree, planted by the mill-owning Baines family who built the house, shades the front lawn so that the habitat now resembles a woodland glade.
In 1960, when I was aged nine, I drew a sketch map of the bird life of shrubbery, lawn and house, including blackbirds, starlings and sparrows.
The bluebells – which I don’t believe we ever planted – look like natives. The bells hang down, while the more vigorous Spanish bluebells, which grow in the border in our own back garden, face outwards.
We’ve seen blue tits and sparrows taking an interest in the nestbox on the wall just outside the back door but it looks as if this year bumblebees have taken possession.
The rosettes of leaves of ribwort plantain and dandelion are spreading like a colony of green starfishes over the corner of the lawn that gets the most trampling by the shed. The rosettes are ground-hugging so that they escape the blades of the mower, so I try taking some of them out using a tool called a grubber which I push in and rotate to lift out the whole plant, taproot and all. 
There’s then a small hole that needs filling with soil. It might be a good idea to spread a bit of grass seed on the bare patch too, but I’m sure that 
at this time of year the surrounding grass will soon spread to fill the gap.
Cleaning the greenhouse involves removing cushions of moss which have grown along the edges of the panes. Under the staging newts play dead when we remove the bags we’d stowed down there in the dampest corner.
A carrion crow is an unusual visitor to the garden. A pair seem to be considering nesting at the edge of the wood and they’ve been engaged in a long-running dispute with the resident magpies.
We’ve got a moth mystery. Small 
moths (not the species I’ve illustrated, most of these have a little ‘snout’) keep appearing in the lounge. We’re wondering, since they seem to magically appear in the evening or first thing in the morning, if they’re finding their way in through some hole or crevice, for instance the hole where the telephone extension comes into the room. They seem to appear in that corner.
We’re almost there with the vegetable garden as this morning we got around to planting the Jet Set onion sets in the bed between the shed and the greenhouse. We spread an old piece of garden fleece over them because we always get a few pulled up by the birds. We push them back in again but until the sets start sprouting we have to take a guess as to whereabouts they came out so we end up with a few gaps and a few being overcrowded.
It felt like the start of summer today as we looked out and saw our first swallows, a pair of them, perched on the telephone wires. They stayed there for more than two hours. I’m sorry that I haven’t got a suitable barn or outbuilding for them to nest in.
We found a fresh hedgehog dropping this morning, on the end slab of the top of the low retaining wall of herb bed, nearest to the house. Less welcome, but seemingly inevitable, 
Barbara says she’s also spotted rat droppings as she edged the lawn. Yesterday our next door neighbours found a dead one at the end of their garden.
Biscuit, the pony with attitude, hasn’t made an appearance in my sketchbook recently. Apparently he has been sold. If Biscuit had been a player on my team, he would definitely have been up for free transfer. But I’ll miss him.
Latest from the blue tit box on the patio; blue tits were in and out of it a couple of weeks ago. A house sparrow briefly investigated it but all we’ve seen in the last week is an occasional bumble bee hovering by the entrance hole and going inside.
For the first time in forty years as a freelance I got my accounts started, finished and even submitted my tax return online in just one day. They’re simple enough – working out the proportion of printing costs against book sales is as complicated as it gets – 
but in previous years there always seemed to be one mystery item that would hold me up.
Now I haven’t got that hanging over me, perhaps I’ll feel more freedom to get off and draw.
It’s been a beautiful day, sunny and settled; perfect for making progress with the veg beds. We’re concentrating on getting our failsafe regular crops in. Broads beans last week, Vivaldi potatoes, beetroot and perpetual spinach today. We also sowed a row of radishes but I wouldn’t describe them as failsafe, perhaps because if they do take and don’t get perforated by flea beetle we invariably miss them at their best.
We’ve cleared all three of our raised beds including the one with the leeks in. The freezer is now full to capacity after Barbara managed to fit in several bags of chopped leeks. It’s hardly the time of year for leek soup so hopefully we’ll find something else that we can make with them.
These three fragments of pottery which we found while digging the lower veg bed must date from well before our house was built in the late 1930s. Perhaps they were mixed in with a wagonload of night-soil (contents of a privy) that was dumped on the field in Victorian times.
The blue and white design was the first to catch my eye. It was only when I took a macro photograph of the crazed white potshard that I spotted that it too has spots of blue glaze on it. A cross section reveals that both shards are made of the same kind of clay and are the same thickness. Both are very slightly curved so I think these are both pieces of a semi-rectangular, tray-like platter.
The earthenware has an almost imperceptible curve on it too. Perhaps it was part of a large jar or bottle.
A view of the cross-section appears to show that it was made of two distinct layers of clay but in close-up you can see that the outer, darker layer fades towards the lighter inner layer. Is this an differential effect due to the way it was fired in the kiln?
It appears to have a light grey glaze on its outer surface. Perhaps it was slip-coated.
A sparrowhawk swoops down across my mum’s leafy back garden and perches in a tall fir, its head hidden amongst the branches as I draw it. In a neighbouring garden the tall lime trees have yet to start springing into leaf.