The path to the northern end of the RSPB Old Moor reserve is closed at the moment to minimise disturbance to the resident bitterns so your best view of the reedbeds is from the Bittern Hide.
Grazing bullocks help keep the grassy margins of the lagoons open. This afternoon they’ve congregated to chew the cud on the banking in the corner by a field gate which is sufficiently exposed to discourage flies.
But the breeze and the occasional showers have made it difficult to draw plants in any detail today.
The great willowherb was growing by a bridge over a drainage ditch while the tufted vetch was climbing amongst the dried grass to a height of three feet with the aid of tendrils at the end of its leaves.
9.47 a.m.; A skein of forty Canada geese approach, honking as they go, from the north-west. The lead bird, followed by the rest of the chevron, has to make a considerable effort to climb to clear the power lines above me.
Grey willow, Salix cinerea, grows in damp acid soils, often, has here near ponds. It has a low spreading habit. A typical grey willow leaf tapers gradually from near the tip towards the base. The goat willow which you can find in similar habitats typically has a more rounded leaf.
‘A reed shaken by the wind’ is my subject at Old Moor today. I’ve labelled it as the common reed, Phragmites communis, but Wikipedia points out that communis is considered an ‘illegitimate name’ and that I should now be calling it Phragmites australis.
It resists the wind not just by its flexibility and its hollow stem construction but because the leaves, growing from sheathes that clasp the stem can rotate as they’re blown around.
While my habitual pen and brown ink might be appropriate for the reed, but I felt that would be too strident for the white water-lily, Nymphaea alba. Dragonflies zoomed around over the pond but the only insects visiting the water-lily as I drew it were a few flies.
Water mint, Mentha aquatica, is now in flower, growing along the edges of the drainage ditches.
Water plantain, Alisma plantago-aquatica, was growing next to it, emerging from the water. Ruskin saw the elegant arrangement of veins in its leaves as an example of the kind of ‘divine proportion’ that inspired Gothic architecture.
When Convent Thoughts, a sharp-focus study of a contemplative nun standing by a lily pond by the Pre-Raphaelite painter Charles Allston Collins’, came in for criticism at the 1851 Royal Academy summer show, Ruskin wrote in a letter to The Times;
“I happen to have a special acquaintance with the water plant Alisma Plantago . . and . . I never saw it so thoroughly or so well drawn. For as a mere botanical study of the Water Lily and Alisma, as well as of the common lily and several other garden flowers, this picture would be invaluable to me, and I heartily wish it were mine.”
Ruskin’s endorsement helped redress the criticism but, although habitat may be right for it, Alisma plantago, the water plantain, doesn’t appear in the painting.
It’s been our best year so far for our Howgate Wonder double cordon. I pruned off all the extraneous growth early in the year and I’ve just given it a summer prune, leaving two or three buds on each twig to encourage fruit buds to form.
The meadow is already starting to look lank and overgrown, not just because it’s the time of year when tall grasses dry up and plants go to seed but also because its resident grazer, Biscuit, the temperamental Welsh pony, has moved on.
The new owners knew what they were taking on. One afternoon a few weeks ago we saw three girls, early teenage and younger, cautiously approaching him, feeding and stroking him then gradually introducing a harness.
A few minutes later we heard a commotion; Biscuit was galloping up the field towards his stable, evidently upset about something. One of the older girls walked after him, the other stood watching. She seemed unconcerned about the youngest who was lying in the long grass, stunned. Eventually she got up with difficulty and limped off up the field, here jodhpurs hanging in long streamers, split on both sides the full length of her legs.
The Yorkshire Wildlife Trust’s Ledsham Vale is a long thin strip of meadow so as the rest of group make their way to the top end I can pause to draw field scabious.
I’ve been back at the RSPB’s Old Moor reserve, keeping my focus on flowers, which makes sense as it’s rather a quiet time for birds. I’ve added more drawings to some of last week’s pages.
Sketches made over the last two days at RSPB Old Moor, South Yorkshire. Having practiced some botanical illustration in the studio last week, I wanted to see how I could carry that through into sketchbook work.
It was so warm at lunchtime today that I took shelter in the family hide, which was pleasantly cool with all the flaps open and light; unusually for a hide it has floor to ceiling windows. Again with improving my observation in mind, I concentrated on one species, the lapwing, until a black-headed gull chased it away.
Great burnet and yellow-rattle.
A variable species, this was growing in a dry area, by a hedge near the visitor centre.
Marsh orchid, probably the Northern Marsh Orchid.
Scrambling amongst vegetation by the marsh.
Melilot, a tall leguminous herb on drier ground.
Lapwing in moult. I guess that it’s an adult but it could be a juvenile coming into its adult plumage.
Purple loosestife – my last sketch of the day and it proved quite a challenge with all those interlocking stems and foliage, especially as it kept blowing about in the afternoon breeze.
Having the plant right there in front of me should make it easy but, like all flowers, this potato is a restless sitter.
It takes me longer than I think to get so far and I’m far from satisfied with the result but the end result isn’t really the point of the exercise;
‘You can only reproduce something well if you [see and observe]. If you can decode what you see, you will be able to explain it, and anyone who sees your drawing will be able to understand it. The artist’s view is just as important and personal as the subject itself.’
Agathe Haevermans, Drawing and Painting the Seashore
I’m happy just to spend the day observing and hopefully turning that into a successful botanical drawing will follow on from that.
In Impressionism by sampling spots of colour in a detached way, you should be able to build up a convincing image even of an object in the landscape that you can’t identify. Courbet was supposedly able to accurately paint a patch on a distant hillside without ever asking what it was – a limestone outcrop, a patch of dried vegetation or a pile of chippings. The colour and texture were enough.
With botanic drawing you’re really trying to deconstruct then reconstruct the subject in order to clearly explain it.
Perhaps I should have taken the flower apart before I started drawing.
The path to the northern end of the RSPB Old Moor reserve is closed at the moment to minimise disturbance to the resident bitterns so your best view of the reedbeds is from the Bittern Hide.
Grazing bullocks help keep the grassy margins of the lagoons open. This afternoon they’ve congregated to chew the cud on the banking in the corner by a field gate which is sufficiently exposed to discourage flies.
But the breeze and the occasional showers have made it difficult to draw plants in any detail today.
