We haven’t grown peppers for years but one of our neighbours offered us seeds so we thought we’d give it another try. Like our tomatoes, they’re taking their time to ripen.
Ripening Peppers
Category: Habitats
Sunflowers
I like drawing sunflowers because of their obvious structure. Despite the repetition, each petal and sepal is slightly different so in drawing them you get into a rhythm, rather like practicing letterforms in calligraphy.
Near the bird feeder in the border we found one sunflower growing from a spilt seed. A few weeks ago it produced a single large flower-head, which has now gone to seed. Meanwhile five or six smaller flowers have appeared.
Sunflowers thrive in the rich soil of our border. Last year we tried daisy-like cosmos flowers here, which we’d grown from seed from a Gardeners’ World magazine. They grew tall and leafy but by mid-autumn they’d put out just a handful of flowers. I feel that we would have had more success in getting them to flower if our soil hadn’t been so rich.
As Storm Ellen swept across Britain on Friday, one of the sunflower heads snapped off and another looked as if it would be next to go. We brought three heads in as cut flowers.
Because they do so well in rich soil, we’ve decided to try growing sunflowers on our revamped meadow area next year. We’ll grow plenty of them from bird seed and hopefully there will be enough flowers for me to draw but plenty left of the plants for the insects and birds.
Back to Backs
This feels like getting back to some kind of normality: sitting with a latte at a table outside Bistro 42 overlooking Ossett’s Friday market and watching the world go by. I want to just draw what is in front of me rather than, as I often do, taking a mental snapshot of a passing figure, so I draw people who look as if they might stay in position for a few minutes. The men waiting on the bench are the most obliging. I find back views expressive. Rather than slapping a facial expression on a character, you can leave the viewer to work out for themselves whether a character is feeling relaxed or slightly; tense, bored or curious.
North Beach, Bridlington
This marginal illustration for one of my Dalesman diaries isn’t meant to be a trail map but you couldn’t go far wrong in finding your way to Danes Dyke Nature Reserve than starting at the harbour and keeping the sea on your right. Look forward to walking it again some time. And, when they come out of lockdown, there’s always the option of catching the Land Train at Sewerby Hall to get back to the harbour in time for fish and chips.
Geranium and grasses
These grasses and the clump of geranium by the pond reminded me of the sort of subject that Frederick Franck would draw in his book The Zen of Seeing, so I decided on a change from my usual pen and colour wash and I’ve stuck with line only. Typically Franck would add a hint of tone by dabbing parts of the drawing with a wet brush or finger tip. I can’t do that as I use waterproof ink.
I had to accept that I wasn’t going to be able to pin down this subject as the grasses were swishing around in the breeze.
Great Yorkshire Creature Count
The Yorkshire Wildlife Trust’s Creature Count is underway this weekend, getting people to count as many species as they can in their gardens. Here are some of the usual suspects that I would now be rounding up, if I’d signed up for the survey this year, but I’m a bit pressed with work in the studio. Must try and join in if they run it next year.
Rodley Nature Reserve
You drive down through what feels like a factory yard, cross a small swing-bridge over the canal then cross the River Aire via a century-old 38m long Pratt truss steel bridge to reach a low-lying area of lagoons and meadows, enclosed on three sides by a meander of the river, so that being on the reserve feels like being on an island. We’re actually on the inner side of the busy Leeds Ring Road, but I feel as if I’ve got a long way away from all that rush.
As a change from my usual approach, I thought I’d launch straight into watercolour for this sketch – no pen, no pencil – which is based on a panorama that I took from one of the hides on a Wakefield Naturalists’ Society field meeting at the reserve in August this year. No field meetings at all this year, which is probably a first for the Nats since the end of World War II.
This is the header image for my August Wild Yorkshire nature diary in The Dalesman.
Broad Beans
There’s a background buzz of bumble and what look like honey bees amongst the flowers fo these broad beans. A song thrush sings from nearby bushes. Yesterday afternoon there was a bit of drama as a crow chased a jackdaw away from the ash trees at the edge of the wood – perhaps the crows have a nest there.
Great Brome
It droops like oats and it has long awns like barley. As this is growing at the edge of a wheat field, I’m guessing that it is great brome, Anisantha diandra, although there are some similar-looking species. Great brome is a grass from the Mediterranean region which grows on waste ground, roadsides and field edges.
The Wikipedia reports that it, and a similar brome, also get referred to as ‘ripgut brome’ in some parts of the world, where the species have become troublesome weeds.
Wrenthorpe Park
This morning’s visit to Alverthorpe Meadows, six miles from home, is the furthest that we’ve been since lockdown began nine weeks ago. We’re meeting up with our friends, or rather Barbara is meeting with Sue and I’m meeting with Roger, as one-to-one with social distancing outdoors is as far as we’ve got in England with the easing of restrictions.
Wrenthorpe Park and the adjoining Alverthorpe Meadows are good for social distancing as there’s plenty of space and most of the paths are wide. Roger and I head up the slope. As we walk by a nestbox on a London plane tree, a blue tit pops out.
Along the top path, close to the railway, I record a blackcap singing. There’s another bird in the recording but we didn’t identify it. We later get a good view of a blackcap singing from the top branches of a willow in a hedgerow near the settling ponds.
A young white poplar in the wood has rows of diamond-shaped scars on its bark. The Collins Tree Guide describes white poplar as ‘the whitest tree in the landscape’.
My friend Roger remembers when the wood was planted during the restoration of the landscape here, twenty or thirty years ago. The wood has established itself well but he feels that it needs some management now so that some of species that were planted can continue to thrive. For instance, he thinks that the hazels might get shaded out at the tree canopy closes in.
Alverthorpe Meadows
We walk down the slope crossing Balne Beck and through a belt of trees to the central meadow.
Elder is now in flower and a pink-flowered hawthorn is still hanging onto its blossom.
In the meadow, flowers of yellow rattle are dotted about amongst the buttercups and the red clover.
Pignut is also in flower and, in a damper area near the ponds, marsh orchids are starting to show.
Growing alongside the orchids, I think that this grass is foxtail, Alopecurus pratensis. Timothy grass, also known as cat’s-tail, is very similar but it flowers a bit later than foxtail.
Common sorrel, Rumex acetosa, was a popular vegetable in Tudor times and was used to make a fish sauce.
This speckled wood was sunning itself on the leaf of a hazel down by the stream. We saw several of them in the dappled shade of woodland edge habitats, along with a few white butterflies. There are extensive nettle patches but Roger commented that there were no signs of damage from caterpillars. The tops of the nettles were slightly wilting but that was because of the morning sun.