4.25 p.m., 40ºF, 5ºC: I find peonies more interesting to draw when the buds are opening up than when they open up into frothy flower-heads, which in our garden often get battered down by summer rain.
There was a dispute over the patio nest box this afternoon: two blue tits looked on anxiously from the clothes line as a female sparrow perched on the front of the box taking a good look in the nest-hole. Sparrows and blue tits took an interest in the box last year but it was finally occupied by red-tailed bumblebees. These birds had better stake their claim soon.
The mixed pack of Wildlife Haven bulbs that we put in a shady, clayey north-east facing bed at the front of the house last autumn are doing well. I’ll put some more elsewhere in the garden next autumn.
The crocuses Cream Beauty and Ruby Giant are in flower but not open on this cool afternoon (39ºF, 4ºC).
Winter aconite
Winter aconites are starting to show and we’re curious to see the aliums and the eranthis also included in this selection.
I prefer the miniature daffodils to the full size version in this bed. The clumps of large daffodils usually end up sprawling over the path, weighed down after rain.
Link:Verve and Blooma who produced the collection of Wildlife Haven bulbs for pollinators (which were stocked at B&Q last autumn)
Youth hosteling with the school, aged 10 (colour added from memory in Photoshop!)
Driving over the bridge at Torside Reservoir brought back memories of my first impressions of hill country.
One Sunday in February 1961 we drove over Holme Moss and down into Longdendale, alongside the reservoir to visit my grandad who was in a nursing home in Cheadle Hulme, Cheshire (now Greater Manchester).
In my drawing, I rearranged the landscape to tell a story; in reality the dam is a mile to the west of the bridge. I like those little details: two hikers, a figure throwing a ball for a dog and a train trundling along the Sheffield to Manchester line, which ran through the Woodhead Tunnel.
Torside Reservoir, Woodhead, Longdendale, from the road to Holme Moss. Yesterday in his budget George Osborne suggested a new Sheffield to Manchester route via an eighteen mile long tunnel. On a day like today, I’d prefer to stick with the old route.
Woodhead is a scattered settlement on the A628 Sheffield to Manchester in the Peak District National Park, Derbyshire.
‘Doesn’t it make you feel lucky?’ says the woman who walks by as we sit drawing and writing at North America, the ruined farm overlooking Langsett reservoir. That’s just what we were thinking. Yesterday, which was equally sunny we’d been stuck inside, so we didn’t take any persuading to get out into the Peak District today.
As a change from the little wallet of children’s wax crayons that I’ve been slipping into my pocket recently, I’ve brought a selection of Derwent Watercolour pencils which I bought some years ago at the Pencil Factory in Keswick at the top end of Derwentwater. They came in a plastic pod which didn’t survive long in my art bag but they fit equally well into a long thin ArtPen tin.
I haven’t brought my water-brush so, after I’ve added the crayon to my drawing, I crouch by a puddle and use a wet finger to spread the colour about.
Red Grouse, Brown Trout
They’re burning a patch of the moor this morning, to improve the habitat for red grouse by providing a patchwork of heather at different stages of growth.
Researchers are sampling the sediment above and below the weir on the River Little Don or Porter at the top end of the reservoir. A study by the University of Hull of tagged brown trout in Langsett Reservoir has revealed that trout attempt to move into the tributary streams from October to January, probably to spawn. Yorkshire Water are considering constructing a fish ladder here to allow the trout to access the suitable habitat upstream.
The heather that we planted in this bed in our front garden, alongside the pavement, was never happy, despite our attempts to make the soil more acid by adding sulphur chips. It got smothered by grass stems and ivy. The ivy was beginning to climb the mountain ash which we planted strategically to mask the lamp post behind it.
I like ivy as it’s provides year round cover for spiders and snails and a foraging area for wrens and dunnocks plus the occasional toad and hedgehog but I must admit that it was starting to look rather overgrown and uncared for.
We’ve been inspired by a sloping bed in a similar position right next to the road at the garden centre at Cannon Hall to try something different but hopefully equally wildlife friendly.
We’ll dispense with the old log roll that we used to create a raised bed for the heather and the conifers and go for a gentle slope instead, covered with bark chippings.
1.15 p.m., 49ºF, 9ºC, sun through high hazy cloud, cool breeze from north northwest: These weeds on the L-shaped bed are going to have to go soon as the weather has suddenly turned springlike, the vernal equinox is almost upon us and it’s time to start thinking about planting veg.
I draw red dead-nettle and a weed, a crucifer, which I wouldn’t attempt to identify before the seed-pods start showing, and by that time I should have weeded it out.
Our crops will need protection, not only from the wood pigeons but also from the possibility of next door’s hens coming over to scrat about. The little red hen has already made it through to us under the hedge and she must have liked what she found as our neighbour couldn’t entice her back and had to come around to retrieve her.
As I draw there’s a loud song from the hedge just a few yards from me but every time I turn around there’s no sign of the bird. Eventually its head pops up at the top of the hedge: it’s a dunnock. It’s song has more get-up-and-go than the comparatively relaxed, reflective phrases of the robin.
Low tide is around midday, so we’re enjoying the two mile walk along the sand from Sandsend to Whitby. It was high time that we came to see the sea again. The waves heave and sigh; the surf swishes and fizzes.
Whitby harbour, 12.25 p.m., 59ºF, 15ºC, cool breeze from sea, hazy: A cormorant flies low over the water and out to sea via the harbour mouth.
A crow probes around the barnacle encrusted rocks on the west side of the harbour. Three or four redshanks fly up from the water’s edge, piping as they go.
Nearer the bridge, the herring gulls have the mud bank staked out. A turnstone does just that – turns over a stone – as we pass. In fact in the minute or so that we’re walking by it turns over four stones. When we humans are rock-pooling the advice is to carefully replace every stone we turn so as not to disrupt the habitat. The turnstone doesn’t bother with that.
I thought that we’d lost our rhubarb this year but after losing an early leaf or two in the frost, the red buds are pushing up again through the wood chip at the edge of the path at foot of the hawthorn hedge. It’s the sunny side of the garden, facing southwest. The rhubarb has grown here since we moved in over thirty years ago, sprouting every year amongst the nettle leaves and the trailing stems of periwinkle. Snowdrops have spread along the foot of the hedge nearby.
Rhubarb leaves come pre-packed in their egg-shaped buds. As they unfurl, I would describe the wavy pattern of the emerging leaf as carunculated, like an elephants skin.
The blue tit has a hurried and rather petulant song which hints at the sound of a child’s bicycle bell. It continues this in flight.
Eggs, birds singing in the trees, leaves like elephants’ ears . . . it reminds me of a playground poem, c.1960:
The elephant is a pretty bird, It flits from bough to bough. It makes its nest in a rhubarb tree And whistles like a cow.
11.40 a.m.: The high pressure is holding over the weekend. It’s still with hazy sunshine. Warm enough to simply walk out of the back door into the garden and draw gloveless. For the first time this year as I set out drawing, I’m wearing jeans not insulated outdoor trousers.
A Bird in the Hand
Do you ever have one of those mornings when you’re sitting on the sofa relaxing with your morning cup of tea and a woman in wellies walks through the room clutching a chicken. Well, to give her her due, our neighbour Juliet did remove her wellies beforehand and had apologised in advance, explaining that the children had let the chickens out earlier and one little red hen had made its way under the hedge into our back garden and had settled by our shed and couldn’t be enticed back even with the promise of food.
But the odd thing is that at the moment I’m reading How to Publish Your Own eBook, which includes, on a sample page of an Apple iBooks’ publication, a photograph of someone holding a red hen under their arm. Just like Juliet as she breezed through before breakfast (we’re semi-detached so that’s the only way from back to front).
12.20 p.m.: Something is coming up to the surface of the pond; I can see the odd ripple. It’s right in amongst the pondweed, so I suspect that it’s newts that are coming up for air but I’m hoping the frogs will soon start showing themselves.
There’s a clear song from the robin in the crab apple; it makes me think of a clear, cool trickle of water.
It’s so much warmer today, at last starting to feel like spring with the temperature here by the pond at lunch time up at 57ºF, 4ºC with the barometer at 30.5 inches of mercury, 1032 millibars, which means we’re in high pressure and the forecast is for it to be dry. It will be a change not to be out drawing in cold damp winter weather.
4.25 p.m., 40ºF, 5ºC: I find peonies more interesting to draw when the buds are opening up than when they open up into frothy flower-heads, which in our garden often get battered down by summer rain.
Sparrows and blue tits took an interest in the box last year but it was finally occupied by red-tailed bumblebees. These birds had better stake their claim soon.
