Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
Drawing this 125 year old olive tree reminded me of our holidays in Greece and Majorca and made me think that I’d like to go drawing there again.
This one grows in a large planter in Crimple Garden Centre’s Bar + Kitchen overlooking the Crimple Valley just outside Harrogate.
In the formal pond at Harlow Carr a carrion crow picks a newt from amongst water plants.
Hellebores on the Winter Walk and in the woodland.
A wood pigeon perches on the shed roof then swoops down to the lawn to chase off another pigeon that has just landed, chasing it around beneath the bird feeders with a menacing waddle punctuated with short jumps. The second pigeon soon realises that it isn’t going to get any peace and flies off.
I like drawing pigeons and that’s just as well because when they fly up from the wood the flock fills our field of vision as they wheel around, well over a hundred of them, probably 200. But we are going to have to net any seedling we plant in the veg beds.
Feeling a bit more springlike at Newmillerdam this morning.
It was good to see water flowing on the Cascade between the Middle and Lower Lakes at Nostell this morning. We haven’t seen it in action for years. The sluice was restored but because of leakage issues the water has been diverted through a sluice and through a pipe for the last five or six years.
A rainy morning in Birstall and my Falcon Housewares enamel jug.
Birch bracket fungus at Newmillerdam this morning.
The wind had snapped off an ash twig, so I brought it home and stood it in a jug of water to watch the male and female catkins unfurl.
As I drew, I couldn’t help thinking of Oliver Reed and Glenda Jackson, in their roles as Gerald Crich and Gudrun Brangwen in one of the opening scenes of Women in Love, where school inspector Gerald interrupts Gudrun’s botany lesson on catkins.
Black-headed gull, wood pigeon and a small flock of starlings fly over Queen’s Drive, Ossett, as we have lunch at the fish and chip restaurant.
With less than a week to go before the start of meteorological spring, I’ve just started a new A6 landscape sketchbook, having just finished an even smaller pocket sketchbook, best suited to pen only. It’s good to be working in colour again.
Our first visit to The Redbrick Mill in Batley since before the pandemic. On a grey windswept morning it was good to see so much colour, artfully balanced by dozens of restfully grey sofas.