SO MUCH to do! But this corner behind the greenhouse, inevitably the most neglected corner of the garden, isn’t going to take too much sorting out if I divide it up into separate tasks such as cutting back, digging the veg beds, clearing the greenhouse and replacing three fence panels that blew down in the autumn.
I saw a total of six daisies on the grass verge on Quarry Hill this morning. How do they manage to flower after the snow and frost we’ve had recently? Being close to the road and sheltered by buildings might help and perhaps as the slope faces the setting sun they get what warmth is available at this time of year but I suspect the main reason is that cars parked on the verge overnight radiate enough heat from their engines to create a pocket of marginally warmer soil, giving this handful of a daisies a head start.
THE BIRD FEEDERS have been so busy recently. Not only do we have the cock Pheasant strutting up the garden every morning, he’s also accompanied by a growing harem of hen Pheasants. Whether he leads them into the garden or whether he tags along with them is debatable.
He was the first bird that we’ve seen drinking from the new bird bath and apart from him we’ve spotted only one Goldfinch perching on the rim, although we didn’t actually see it drink.
For much of today there have been up to a dozen Goldfinches feeding, often joined by Bullfinches (2 males, 1 female) and more occasionally by Greenfinches (3).
A female Chaffinch skulks around below, picking up spilt grain but Barbara spotted it briefly visiting the feeder during a quiet spell at breakfast-time. I don’t remember ever having seen one on the hanging feeders but the type that we’re using now have accessible perches (plastic rings at each hole) and they’re very close to the hedge which the Chaffinch perches in so it’s surprising that we don’t see it going directly to the feeder more often.
It’s the RSPB garden bird-watch this weekend, so we’re hoping that all these colourful finches will turn up to be counted during the allotted hour.
Another bird that uses the feeders infrequently and with difficulty is the Robin. It returned several times to the fat-ball feeder.
There were two Robins in the hedge by the feeders this afternoon, one soon chasing off the other.
Note; My drawings today are from sketches I’ve made over the years, some going back to the early days of this diary, a decade ago. Screen resolutions and average bandwidths were so different then, so if I could get a sketch, like the little one of the Bullfinch down to 1 kilobyte, I thought I was doing well. Seeing these on my latest computer I’m surprised how flat and dotty those early GIF (graphic image files) are. They used to look just about acceptable but I’d do things differently today.
THE WIND builds up again this morning, swaying the tops of the tall conifers, a Leylandii and a fir, in my mum’s back garden.
The needles of the fir are small and strap-like, each about 1.5 cm long, coming to a point at the tip. Unlike pines, where the needles grow in pairs (or in threes or fives), these grow individually from the stem.
I could see the fir’s long sausage-shaped cones growing from some of the top branches but despite the wind, I couldn’t find any on the the ground to take closer look.
The bark is smooth, pitted with pores.
Leyland Cypress
Female cone of Leylandii, diameter 1 cm, one third of an inch, photographed with the microscope.
The leaves of the Leylandii, (Leylandii) x Cupressocyparis leylandi, are scale-like. The small female cones have eight scales and the seeds (2 mm) are disk-shaped (right).
The multiple stems of this Leylandii have rough bark.
Spring Flowers
The snowdrops at my mum’s have been showing for a week or two now with yellow aconite, a relative of the buttercup coming into flower this week.
The hellebore or Christmas Rose has been in flower throughout the winter but the yellow crocus is only just showing signs of bursting into flower.
AT SOME POINT during the night the wind blew the hinged plywood lid off the compost bins, luckily missing the greenhouse just feet away. Elsewhere in Yorkshire, lorries were overturned and trees brought down. On a positive note, the level in our leaky pond has risen slightly thanks to all the rain we’ve had.
According to weatherman Paul Hudson we’ve had rain on 34 of the past 35 days. Winds reached 93 mph at High Bradfield, South Yorkshire. Chimney pots have come down and one lean-to roof was blow right across the roof a house.
IT’S HARD to believe that at last we’ve completed all our Christmas errands and finished off as many home improvements we need to before Christmas. The days are now getting longer, just two minutes a day, but that will soon add up. To celebrate this small but significant change and to draw a line in the sand (well in the mud at this time of year), we set off for a short walk along the towpath in the rapidly fading light.
A heron flies past Beckside Farm and over the old grey viaduct. Two Mute Swans bring grace and elegance to the canal basin at Horbury Bridge.
On one narrowboat, they’ve improvised a giant Christmas pudding by the tiller, using a black plastic bin bag and cut-out holly leaves.
We turn back when we reach the pylon wires, which are sizzling and crackling in the rain like sausages in a frying pan. The pylon, standing on the steep bank above a belt of broadleaves, makes a stark Christmas tree silhouette.
Just 15 minutes walk from our doorstep and I feel as if we’ve escaped into real countryside and experienced the wider world.
As we walk back up from the towpath alongside the Bingley Arms, I rub my fingers through the Wormwood to smell this bitterly aromatic herb. It’s appropriate that it should be planted here by the pub as it has been used in brewing and as a flavouring in absinthe and in some Polish vodkas.
IN A STRIP in one of the raised beds we planted a row of leeks in the spring; flimsy grass-like seedlings from a punnet we’d bought in the garden centre. This morning I dug out one from the end of the row and it’s now so large that this one leek gave Barbara enough to make a large pan of leek and potato soup. It’s one of our most trouble-free crops. They were watered a few times when they first went in, weeded two or three times since and that’s it. An impressive crop from an area the size of four or five sheets of A4 paper.
And talking of leaks, the pond is still a disaster area, damaged, we guess, by rodent activity beneath the liner. There’s still some water and some pondweed in the deeper section, so hopefully the pond life can survive until we can find a solution to the problem.
The whole garden is in need of attention after the distractions of selling Barbara’s mum’s house this summer, followed by me working on my book. The wood chippings on the paths are in need of freshening up. In the shade of the hedge near the plastic compost bins by the shed, honey fungus and another variety that I’ve forgotten the name of are sprouting luxuriantly.
Victorian Fair
This morning I enjoyed a rather light-hearted piece of graphic design, using Microsoft Publisher; designing a poster for the launch of my book (so please do look out for me if you’re at the Victorian Fair). It’s in the style of a Victorian playbill rather than trying to be a facsimile, an excuse to use some of the hundred plus fonts that I’ve accumulated over the years.
Correction, that’s, well over a hundred; my font folder contains 1626 items!
Well, you can never have too many fonts can you? I remember my college days when the typography department was limited to little more than Times New Roman and Univers, while Letraset offered exotic possibilities such as Carousel and Bookman Bold Italic. But on my limited budget I’d be just as likely to put the Letraset catalogue in the Grant Enlarger and trace my text letter by letter. I couldn’t have dreamt of having access to a thousand fonts via my desk top at home.
But even with so much choice, I still feel that sometimes hand lettering works best with my sketch maps and drawings.
Line versus Half Tone
I’ve been using Microsoft Publisher 2010 for the layout of my book and it’s been working well but I decided to take the opportunity of giving Serif’s PagePlus X5 a try when they rang me with a special offer. I used a previous version of PagePlus for my colour walks booklets but it proved to be unsuitable for my new paperback format. Unfortunately the same applies to the new version, which I tried on my computer this morning.
Line art in Publisher 2010, magnified about ten times.
I’ve enjoyed the discipline of working in black and white for the new book and that’s how I want the drawings to be seen on paper; in crisp black and white.
That’s the result that I get with Publisher (left) when I scan my drawing at 1200 dots per inch. Any pixel has to be either black or white so the image is made up from a mosaic of tiny black and white rectangles. This gives a stepped appearance to a line, particularly a diagonal line.
This close up is from a PDF of a page produced in Publisher and printed on my laser printer. You can’t tell what the paper output will be like simply by looking at the artwork on-screen.
Line artwork in PagePlus X5; where did those half-tone dots come from?
Unfortunately that’s not what I get with PagePlus (right). Dots appear around my pen lines showing that a half tone screen has been added. This softens the appearance of those stepped lines but the effect is almost imperceptible unless you look at the drawing through a hand lens. A halo of half tone around lines is something to be avoided if your work is intended to be printed professionally as line artwork as those dots can clog up with unpredictable consequences.
You might think that I’m being over fussy but, after the weeks that I’ve spent preparing and scanning my drawings and designing my pages, I want everything to turn out just as I’ve planned it.
I’M DRAWING a motley crew of folk; ‘an assemblage of odds and ends of people, a rabble’. This rabble has yet to be roused but they’re a sufficiently motley assortment.
I used ArtPen on layout paper, filling in with a Cotman watercolour brush and Calli ink, making up the characters as I went. With no sketched pencil line to follow and no rough to trace I felt as if I had more freedom. The result looks perfectly idiotic, so I quite like it.
The actual size that I’d be printing this would be only an inch or two across, so you’re seeing the widescreen version here.
The Lawn Ranger
11 a.m.: A neighbour’s ginger cat is paying close attention to one particular spot on the lawn, sniffing it with intense interest.
What is it up to?
It turns around and sticks its paw into a hole –
a vole hole – reaching right down, like someone trying to retrieve keys from the back of a sofa.
It reminds me of a friend of my mum & dad’s, Denny from Dovercourt, who once saw a man lying by the side of the road with a look of agony on his face;
“Are you all right? Shall I send for an ambulance?”
“No . . . ugh . . . I’m fine . . . ugh . . . I’m just . . . trying . . . to turn off this stopcock.”
OUR LONG SPELL of mainly dry weather has ended with a good drenching which we’re hoping will persuade the runner beans and courgettes to spring into action again. At least the dry spell has meant that we’ve had plenty of raspberries ripening.
In the heavy rain at 5 a.m. yesterday morning, the electricity went off and we didn’t get it back until 12 hours later. Fortunately we have a gas hob (and a whistling kettle standing by for such emergencies!) so we were able to turn the ripe Victoria Plums that my mum had given us yesterday into 6 lbs – ten jars of various sizes – of jam. We’re getting used to not over-setting it.
THE WILD GLADIOLUS, Gladiolus ilyricus, is a native of south and west Europe but is considered to be a native of the British Isles with a very local distribution in the New Forest where it grows on acid grass heaths. The showy variety that I’ve drawn here is a florist’s variety of the plant, perhaps the Italian Gladiolus, Gladiolus italicus, which is the one most often grown in this country. It is sometimes seen growing as a garden escape on rubbish tips.
As you might guess, the name comes from the same root as ‘gladiator’. Gladius is the Roman word for a small sword; the name refers to the shape of the leaves.
Gladioli are members of the Iris family and I can see the resemblance to Yellow Flag.
THIS RELATIVE of the dandelion grows around the edges of the lawn, mainly on the shadier side. It tends to be larger than the Autumn Hawkbit which I drew the other day. It’s leaves aren’t as narrow as those of the Hawkbit and the teeth of Cat’s-ear don’t point backwards.
Cat’s-ear, Hypochaeris radicata, is a plant of meadows, heath, dunes, lawns and roadsides, on mildly acid soils. The ‘cat’s ear’ of its name refers to the scale-like bracts on its stem.
SO MUCH to do! But this corner behind the greenhouse, inevitably the most neglected corner of the garden, isn’t going to take too much sorting out if I divide it up into separate tasks such as cutting back, digging the veg beds, clearing the greenhouse and replacing three fence panels that blew down in the autumn.
I saw a total of six daisies on the grass verge on Quarry Hill this morning. How do they manage to flower after the snow and frost we’ve had recently? Being close to the road and sheltered by buildings might help and perhaps as the slope faces the setting sun they get what warmth is available at this time of year but I suspect the main reason is that cars parked on the verge overnight radiate enough heat from their engines to create a pocket of marginally warmer soil, giving this handful of a daisies a head start.
