Trees at the Hospice today and the Showcase Cinema at Birstall yesterday.
Trees in March
Category: Habitats
Broadstairs 1973
Another dip into my student sketchbook from 50 years ago and I was visiting Christopher and Doreen Reynolds in Broadstairs. I’d written about Christopher and his approach to natural history illustration and writing as a closing section in my thesis at Leeds College of Art but this was the first time I’d met him.
It was so useful to go beachcombing ‘with someone who could not only say what the shells and washed up animals and plants were but could also, if prompted, come up with some interesting observation about it.’
He was writing and illustrating his children’s non-fiction book Creatures of the Bay at that time.
Snowy Morning
Snow, rapidly melting, at the hospice this morning.
Hospice Cherry Trees
Flowering cherry (or some other kind of Prunus?) at the hospice this morning.
Blackbirds are singing, wood pigeons occasionally perch in the branches but the most remarkable bird was a red kite, seen from the car park.
Crystal Dendrite
In a flagstone just outside John’s patio windows, these dendritic crystals look like the fossil of a tree but they’re actually crystals – perhaps of manganese as they’re black – that have grow across the layers of this flagstone, in a similar from to the ice crystals in a snowflake.
Street Kitchen
The fast food at the Falafel Street Kitchen was a tad too fast for me and this was as far as I was able to get in sketching the customers.
Luckily the pace at the Nats’ AGM was a little more sedate. Even so, these days we get through the business side of the evening in a little over fifteen minutes.
The Veg Shed
Like a scene from Peter Rabbit, a woman walks up the garden path to Hilary’s cafe with a large bunch of fresh carrots, holding them by the lush ferny foliage of the carrot tops.
She’s soon back down the shed, returning again with three Petanque boule-size beetroots, again with fresh-looking foliage.
“I only came here for a cup of coffee!” she explains.
Coot
At Newmillerdam most of the black-headed gulls now have their chocolate brown masks but they all seem remarkably laid back this morning with no noisy disputes. Soon they’ll be gathering at their nesting colony at St Aidan’s.
Another reason for it seeming so peaceful is that there are no Canada geese around. Last week I saw a flock of more than a hundred by the canal opposite the Strands and a similar flock on the Wyke.
By the outlet at Newmillerdam a lone coot was diving for freshwater mussels. In the few minutes as we passed by it apparently finished feeding on one and then dived for another. The mussel was the size of a small grape.
Squirrel Baffle
Rainy, grey skies, a wind from the north, so it doesn’t feel like the first day of meteorological spring.
8.30 a.m.: A grey squirrel bounds across the lawn.
It soon realises that it can’t climb around the baffle on the bird feeder post.
It climbs into the hawthorn hedge and you can see it weighing up the possibilities. No, not worth it. It scampers off across next door’s lawn.
The Crown
As a complete change from the graphic symmetry of the library logo on our day off in Harrogate today I’ve gone for a freeform drawing exercise, suggested by Ian Burke of the Staithes Gallery on a recent episode of Robson Green’s Weekend Escapes.
In contrast to all the planning that went into constructing the library facade for the logo, the aim here is to keep your pen on the paper and just keep drawing.
I know what you’re thinking, even for a freeform drawing isn’t that too wobbly? But I was drawing through the windows of the Palm Court Cafe above Farrar’s so I was looking through the rippled glass leaded lights of the cafe’s windows.
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The Crown Hotel, Harrogate
Palm Court Cafe, Harrogate
The View from the Boathouse
Just a taste (in this case a Bakewell and a latte) of the research that I’ve put into my article The bear, the bulldog and the boathouse, celebrating the 200th anniversary of the Boathouse at Newmillerdam, in the March issue of The Dalesman, out today.
That chair is on the spot where sharp-shooting French bulldog enthusiast Lady Kathleen Pilkington (see article) sat 121 years ago in 1902.
My thanks to Experience Wakefield, www.experiencewakefield.co.uk for their support when I was researching this article.
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