Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
Garden designer Jack Wallington and Wakefield artist Helen Thomas launched the ‘Dandelion and Double Yellows – Your Gallery’ online gallery at Wakefield’s Festival of the Earth yesterday.
Dandelions and Double Yellows – Your Gallery at Creative Wakefield
‘Always draw with movement from the elbow or shoulder, never from the wrist’ was the advice that I read in a book on illustrating graphic novels recently. So that’s where I’ve been going wrong all these years. I’ve always had shaky hands so drawing from the wrist rather than the fingers is usually about as free as I get. For this geranium I made a point of moving my whole arm, so it helped that we were sitting in a cafe table and I could steady my arm by resting it on the table.
I didn’t find it so easy when I was kneeling, clutching my little A6 Hahnemuhle Watercolour Book, beside one of the beds in the walled garden at Sewerby Hall, drawing a red admiral on what I think was Hylotelephium telephium, a relative of the sedums. I find it impossible to sit in a crosslegged yoga pose, so kneeling is the best I can do.
Hoverflies were also attracted to the flowers and basked in the sun on the surrounding box edging.
Reading up on comic strips and graphic novels makes me more aware of the stylisation that we’re familiar with in everyday life. Looking closely at this apostle teaspoon, part of the mismatched cutlery and crockery at Hilary’s in Cawthorne, I could see that someone had designed him with the sort of stylish simplification that you’d put into designing a character in a manga or comic strip story. He could appear as the ‘wise old man’ mentor for some hero, like Alec Guinness’s Obi-Wan Canobi in Star Wars.
‘You have much to learn, Grasshopper!’ would be a suitable aphorism for the Apostle-spoon character if he was admonishing me for my inability to adopt the lotus position, but it was actually Master Po’s line to David Carridine’s trainee monk in the 1970s television series, Kung Fu.
My mum had some teaspoons with Egyptian characters on them and I hope that I managed to keep one when we cleared her house. Now I’m thinking could they have come back with my dad from Egypt after the war. I don’t ever remember asking my mum about the story behind them.
I promise this is the final instalment in my vegetable trilogy: vine-ripened tomatoes. And these were supermarket grown, although I’m hoping we’ll still have some ripening in the greenhouse into next month.
From my student sketchbook, South Kensington, February 1973: I bought this Bromeliad from a plant shop on Gloucester Road for 80 pence. Bromeliads are epiphytes from Brazil . . . but as to which species this is . . . I don’t know. I water it by filling the central rosette.
These crumbly, flakey, croissants are splendid to draw and tasted as good as they looked . . . reminding me of Petit-dejeuner on sunny mornings on the balcony of the Hotel de Centinaire in the Dordogne.
I’ve dipped into my winter 1973 student sketchbook because this morning I had to decide on one book to throw out – no not the sketchbook! – as I’m trying to send one book to the charity shop for every new book that I buy.
Difficult decision as even books that I’m never going to read again have some nostalgic value for me. I bought Town Gardening by Robert Pearson for 15 pence from a bookshop on a quieter back street somewhere near the Kensington end of the Earl’s Court Road and, like the house plants, it was part of my attempt to create my own little green space in the city.
In the student hostel at Evelyn Gardens had a window ledge where I grew sweet corn in cut-down milk tetrapacks. I started – but never finished – constructing my own version of a Wardian case with built-in fluorescent lights.
So the advice in Town Gardening, to use Mowrah meal, derris, DDT or lead arsenate to get rid of that ‘troublesome pest’ the earthworm, when it disfigures your lawn, wasn’t, thank goodness relevant to me.
Yes, probably a wise move parting with this book.
When birds revert to their dinosaur origins . . .
I’m drawing this with a scratchy dip pen with an F. Collins & Co. Tower Pen brass nib, made in Manchester. The elegant pen holder, which I bought in France, has a satisfyingly robust brass ferule at the business end and a dangerously sharp point at the end that is nearest your eye.
I’m using Rohrer’s Black which, of course, isn’t as free-flowing as the inks that I use in my Lamy fountain pens but it has a dense ‘inky blackness’.
It felt awkward drawing the pepper, as if I was drawing everything overhand. Perhaps if I’d been drawing it facing the other way, the curves would have felt more natural to draw: they might have sloped more naturally, like the slope of cursive handwriting.
But the scratchy line suited the wayward growth of the plant. I grew it from the seeds of a pepper from the supermarket, using our own home-made compost.
We’ve had only two peppers and we’ve used them green as they were showing no sign of turning yellow or red. They’re not as fleshy as the supermarket variety, but they’ve got more of a fresh crunch to them.
We grew peppers last year from seeds that a neighbour gave us. This year’s have a better flavour: last year’s were rather bitter, perhaps because of the weather or the variety.
We haven’t recorded a fox at the end of the garden on the trail cam for weeks now so, as we’ve recently trimmed back around the pond and scooped out the duckweed, I’ve set up my Browning Strike Force Pro XD trail cam there. This morning at 10 it recorded a dunnock (above) followed a few minutes later by a house sparrow.
Ten minutes earlier this greenfinch had been down at the pond’s edge.
It looks as if it’s drying itself off after bathing but, if it had been, the camera didn’t catch it. I need to clear out the last of the duckweed to give the birds better access.
At eleven o’clock yesterday the inevitable wood pigeon waddled by and a squirrel bounded along, slightly blurred on the photograph.
With a closer camera angle and a bit of stage management of duckweed and pebbles, this could be the perfect spot for a back garden stake-out.
The last time we caught the fox on the trail cam was at 10.30, two nights ago, in the back garden.
Last night it didn’t show but wood pigeon, magpie and Boris, a neighbour’s cat, triggered it between six and eight this morning.
Apparently all the action was in our front garden. This morning a cluster of wood pigeon breast feathers and a pile of fox scats were all the evidence left by whatever drama took place under the rowan tree between dusk and dawn.
We’re trimming hedges and taking up the broad beans this morning, so our new compost bins are proving useful. To create more room for the glut of material at this time of year, I’ve been moving the progressively more broken down compost from one bin to another. Bin 3 is almost ready to use. Some of it was wet and claggy but forking it across from bin 2 gave me the chance to break up the clumps and let the air get to it.
In case of downpours, I’ve covered bins 2 and 3 with opened-out compost bags, held down with a few bricks. There’s still plenty of opportunity for the air to get to the compost because there are one-inch gaps between the slats.
I was pleased to see one or two small red earthworms as I lifted the plastic sheets. Often referred to as brandling worms, they’re part of the recycling system in compost-making.
Testing my new Browning Strike Force Pro XD trail cam yesterday in the back garden: at night in infrared mode on red fox and in daylight on grey squirrel, juvenile blackbird and dunnocks.
We think there may be two foxes; the first, with a bushy tail appears at 10.13 p.m., then ten minutes later there’s a similar-looking fox crossing the screen and finally, at 10.26, a fox with an apparently thinner tail with a lighter tip to it appears to notice the infrared light and it heads off.
The following night we recorded no fox activity, so I hope that we haven’t put them off with the infrared.