Category: Garden

The Cat and the Rat

cat in the hedgeA neighbour’s cat watches intently through the hawthorn hedge from its vantage point on next door’s concrete coal bunker.

It pounces and chases a brown rat, coming close to catching it. The rat looks healthy enough but it has been behaving strangely, roaming about in the afternoon sunshine, showing little concern for danger. For a while it stopped and was nibbling at the edge of the frosty, still mainly snow-covered lawn. brown ratPerhaps it has eaten poison bait put out by one of our neighbours and it’s now feeling thirsty, which seems to be one of the symptoms of rat poison. Ponds are currently deep frozen so perhaps it was quenching its thirst with ice crystals.

Leek Soup

leek

The leek bed might be looking neglected and weedy but it’s still productive. Looking down the garden I could see that some of the plants were starting to bolt, starting to send up flowering shoots that are tough and solid.

The garden shades colour that I used for the raised beds is a pretty good match for them.

leeksThese leeks gave us our lunch – two bowls of leek and potato soup – with a bit left over for tomorrow lunch and we stashed four bags of chopped leeks in the freezer, enough for another twelve portions.

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Moss Garden

  • Leaf of leek.

It’s my final day of taking five black and white photographs a day but this time I didn’t get the chance to go further than the back garden. The mossy lawn, overgrown pond and garden shed didn’t look very inspiring but as soon as I saw the honey fungus on the path I began to focus in on the grassroot jungle of the meadow and the moss garden on the sandstone rocks surrounding the raised bed.

Back Garden Backlog

leeks mossy lawnWe’ve got an impressive crop of leeks but some are going to seed and there’s mildew on the leaves. Time to make some soup and bag some ready-prepared in the freezer.

tomatoThe back lawn is more moss than grass down by the pond and the pond itself has been in need of clearing of duckweed since the summer.

Come to think of it, every bit of the garden needs a clear-out for the winter, including the greenhouse, where a few ripe tomatoes still hang on the vines.

catThe big black and white tomcat swaggers through the meadow. A new addition to his territory is a bonfire night rocket. Not quite as impressive as landing a probe on a comet.

Welsh Poppywelsh poppy

Welsh poppy seedheadwelshpoppy3Mid-November and there’s still a lot in flower and a lot of spring flowering shrubs and flowers appearing early.

Most poppies have seedheads that resemble pepper pots; the Welsh poppy has slots. They remind me of Gaudi’s cathedral towers.

Howgate Wonder

Howgate WonderIt’s been our best year so far for our Howgate Wonder double cordon. I pruned off all the extraneous growth early in the year and I’ve just given it a summer prune, leaving two or three buds on each twig to encourage fruit buds to form.

Potato

potatoHaving the plant right there in front of me should make it easy but, like all flowers, this potato is a restless sitter.

It takes me longer than I think to get so far and I’m far from satisfied with the result but the end result isn’t really the point of the exercise;

‘You can only reproduce something well if you [see and observe]. If you can decode what you see, you will be able to explain it, and anyone who sees your drawing will be able to understand it. The artist’s view is just as important and personal as the subject itself.’

Agathe Haevermans, Drawing and Painting the Seashore

I’m happy just to spend the day observing and hopefully turning that into a successful botanical drawing will follow on from that.

In Impressionism by sampling spots of colour in a detached way, you should be able to build up a convincing image even of an object in the landscape that you can’t identify. Courbet was supposedly able to accurately paint a patch on a distant hillside without ever asking what it was – a limestone outcrop, a patch of dried vegetation or a pile of chippings. The colour and texture were enough.

With botanic drawing you’re really trying to deconstruct then reconstruct the subject in order to clearly explain it.

potato flower partsPerhaps I should have taken the flower apart before I started drawing.

 

Potato Flower

potato flowerI take a break for coffee and when I return most of the flowers have closed up, so there’s an element of reconstruction in the watercolour.

Just the foliage to add now.

Potato in Pencil

potato flowers in pencilMr AtkinsonMr Atkinson, my maths teacher, saw me struggling with geometry and examined my pencil;

‘You could plant a potato with that, Bell!’

Sharpening up my act, this morning I’m drawing potato flowers with a 4H pencil, sharpened with a craft knife and honed to a point with an abrasive pad.

I don’t ever remember choosing a 4H for drawing but I’m taking advice from Agathe Haevermans’ The Art of Botanical Drawing and she often suggests starting out with a hard pencil. If you need to erase there’s less risk of damaging the surface of the paper because the harder lead stays on the surface.

For white flowers like these she suggests erasing almost to the point where your outlines become invisible, so that you don’t get pencil lines showing through your wash.

This variety of second early potato is Vivaldi and, by coincidence when I started this drawing they were playing Vivaldi’s Concerto in B Flat on Radio 3.

Basil, African Blue

basilBasil never seems very happy in our garden so we’re going to see if this African Blue variety does any better.

Pencil and watercolour isn’t normally my thing but I’m currently reading Agathe Ravet-Haevermans’ Drawing Nature, so I’m giving her favourite media a try.

She works as a botanical draughtsman at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris and her approach has a typically French analytical edge. She suggests that you should start by looking for the axis for a plant or an individual leaf;

‘To make the drawing a coherent whole, you must always draw the axis first and the surrounding elements after’

This is rather different to my approach to observational drawing where I map out shapes and the negative spaces between them, trusting that the whole plant will then look convincing.

Blossoming

apple blossomI’m keen to get drawing again but it proved to be a busy day so this drawing of apple blossom on our Howgate Wonder double cordon was drawn through the patio windows at 8.30 this evening.

Also spotted in the garden today; a jay – unusually – at the front in our neighbour’s sumac a breakfast-time, a hedgehog on the back lawn after dark and, far less welcome than either of those, a large brown rat. We stopped feeding the birds for a month or more and we thought the rats had gone but they soon homed in on the sunflower seed when we started again this weekend.

Rats are supposed to be intelligent and I can’t deny that this one was showing a great deal of ingenuity in its attempts to get to the feeders, climbing out on the edge of the wheelbarrow that I keep upended by the compost heap (I’ve moved the bird-feeders right down the garden away from the house).

When it succeeded in shinning up one of the poles, I decided that it was time to remove the feeders and I’ll try hanging them in the rowan at the front in the hope that it doesn’t find them there.

I took the chance to step out of the back door to hear the dawn chorus when I got up to make a cup of tea at quarter past five this morning. It was overcast and misty, a little before sunrise. Sound travels faster through cool, therefore denser air, so the combined songs of what seemed like a hundred birds in neighbouring gardens and the nearby wood was quite impressive. The only song that I could pick out was the blackbird, one close to the house;  a mellow, melodious, unhurried song.