IT’S NOT LOOKING good for our Ash trees. The fungus, Chalara fraxinea, that has killed around 90% of Ash trees in Denmark and in other parts of Europe has spread here, with cases reported from several locations in Yorkshire. It’s hard to think of this familiar view from my studio without those two tall Ashes on the edge of the wood, the one on the right thickly covered in ivy. As I type this two Magpies have flown into its top branches.
But two large Ashes at the entrance to the woods have blown down since we moved here in the 1980s and a third was felled before it got a chance to fall on the newly built houses but the wood doesn’t take long to rejuvenate itself and fill in the gaps.
Ash saplings soon colonised a rock fall in the old quarry in the wood; they prefer well drained, even rubbly soils, for example the steep little roadside embankment leading to the bridge over the railway at the bottom of Quarry Hill.
On damper ground by the stream that runs through the wood, Crack Willows are the dominant tree although a level meadow area, long neglected, has been transformed to Alder woodland in the few decades that we’ve been here. Horse riders used to break into a canter on this short stretch of open level ground but now what’s left of what was once a conspicuous path has almost disappeared in the thicket of new trees.
It’s hard to imagine the West Yorkshire countryside without Ash trees – they grow like weeds in the right habitat, and their wavy limbs are a wayward contrast to the dominant sturdy but rather dour Sessile Oak. I feel that they’ve got a central role in north country folklore because of their place in Viking mythology.
My guess would be that if they go Sycamores would move in to replace them in most situations. Sycamores have similar ‘helicopter’ seeds; samara is the exotic sounding botanical name for this kind of winged nut. Perhaps in more open areas Silver Birch would take the place of Ash as a coloniser.
WHEN I collected this Sweet Chestnut at Newmillerdam a few weeks ago, the spiky case was still green and the nuts, barely ripe, were just starting to peep out as the fruit started to split.
The little necks sticking up from each nut are the remains of the stigma and style – the female parts of the Sweet Chestnut flower. The male part of the flower, a small bobbly ‘catkin’ usually gests detached from the ripening fruit.
Artichoke gall, also known as Hop Gall, on Sessile Oak.
THIS MAKES A CHANGE; sitting with my sandwich, leaning against the trunk of an oak, the tree canopy above me and birches and bracken stretching down to the stream below. I’m deep in the wood yet only 15 minutes walk from my front door. I timed it because yesterday, when I first tried a lunchtime mini-adventure, I had assumed that I would have time to walk the full circuit of the valley but I hadn’t factored in the number of times that I’d stop to photograph fungi so I ended up rushing to get back home on time.
It’s better to have more time to stop and enjoy my surroundings. Even half an hour of brisk walking is better than none.
My habitual lunch break, when I’m on my own and Barbara is working at the bookshop, would be something on toast then to slump on the sofa with a mug of tea and listen to The World at One. But we’re in the middle of the party conference season so what better time for a change!
Of course, I’d love to have time to draw too but these photographs give an impression of what you can see in the wood, even during a one hour lunch break.
Stress proof your life
I can’t make a case for my life being particularly stressful but I couldn’t resist picking up Stress proof your life; 52 brilliant ideas for taking control by Elisabeth Wilson when I saw it in the library.
I had to work away one day last week, doing some lettering on boards, which gave me an opportunity to observe how someone else ran her business. Although she ran a much bigger, more involved business than mine, it got me reassessing my working habits.
As a freelance illustrator, I can choose what I do and who I work for, so why, so often, do I feel frustrated at not being able to settle to my work?
Self-help books are something that you have to read when you’re in a suitably open-minded mood otherwise the content washes over you and you think ‘that would be a good idea, if I ever have the time to put it into practice’. But things are settling down for me this autumn. I’ve cleared the decks by completing the illustrations for the museum and my article for the Coxley newsletter so I’m more than ready to settle down to my own work.
10, 20, 30
In this situation, chapter 4 in Stress proof your life, ‘Never procrastinate again’ seems especially appealing. Wilson explains the ‘rotation method’ devised by Mark Forster, featured in his time management book, Get Everything Done.
You divide your working session into segments;
Working down each column from left to right, I spent ten minutes on each of the activities, half an hour in total, then twenty minutes on each, finishing with three half hour sessions. I used a kitchen timer to keep track.
Coffee breaks are taken in between. There’s nothing magical about the 10, 20, 30 – you can change those times to suit yourself – and you needn’t limit it to three activities but those three reflect the three strands of my work.
One of the big advantages of being freelance is the unbroken blocks of time you can sometimes find yourself with, so why should I want to break up my day like this?
Writer’s Block
Three reasons:
Book: I’m suffering from a case of writer’s block with my ‘Book’ (title omitted to save my embarrassment at having spent eight years researching it!). When I sit down to start, the task always seems too daunting. But even I can get motivated and compose myself sufficiently to spend 10 minutes on it. Then, having broken the ice and taken a break with the two other, less demanding, activities, I’m happy to put in a further 20 minutes and so on.
InDesign: I always have something that I’m trying to learn; at the moment it’s the desk-top publishing program, InDesign but if I leave it until I have a free half day to devote to the subject, I can go a month or more without settling down to it. Then when I do spend several hours on one subject it can be too much. You can learn more in three twenty minute sessions than in a single one hour session.
Fungi: for ‘Fungi’ read any kind of natural history drawing or writing notes for this online diary. Typically I’ll leave this until about 4.30 in the afternoon when I’ve put in a good session on my work proper (my current book or freelance work). But my natural history drawing and writing form the basis of my work. If I’m to keep things fresh, broaden my knowledge of my specialist subject and keep myself interested, I should factor it into my day.
During the couple of days that I’ve tried this regime, it’s worked well. I’m keen to keep escaping to the natural world during my lunch break. If my morning and afternoon sessions are suitably productive thanks to a spot of time management, I should be able to justify an hour’s break each day – a little over an hour as I have to fill a flask and make a sandwich (peanut butter and local honey in homemade granary, based on Ray Mears’ suggestion for his favourite fellwalking sandwich!).
Oh, and in autumn woodland, there’s more essential; a folding foam mat to sit on.
Love the job you’ve got
I think you’d get more stressed if you attempted to sample every single one of the 52 stress busting techniques in Elisabeth Wilson’s book, but I like what she says about work in the chapter on ‘How to love the job you’ve got’;
‘ask yourself how you can make it special, imbue it with your own uniqueness, breathe creativity and a little bit of love into it.’
Not a bad mission statement for me to have in mind as I work on my book.
Link: Mark Forster’s Get Everything Done. His latest is book is intriguingly titled Do It Tomorrow, which sounds like a time wasting technique but Forster has a knack of offering a fresh approach to people like me who’ve got themselves in a bit of a rut.
I can’t find a website for Elisabeth Wilson.
Tuesday: The corn on the cob has swollen a little since I last drew this sweet corn in a veg bed in the library garden a week ago.
IT’S STARTING to spot with rain as I sit on a bench waiting for the bus and sketch Ingham’s Handyman Shop at the bottom end of Queen Street, Horbury. Using a folded scrap of laser printer paper resting on my knee isn’t going to give the best results, but it’s a drawing that I wouldn’t otherwise have done.
It’s been a scrappy week altogether for drawing. This sketch of Tilly the bookshop border collie was drawn with a Q-Connect Fineliner, a 0.4mm fibre tip pen which is designed to give you 1,800 metres of writing, ruling or stencilling.
It isn’t 100% waterproof, so I tend to use other pens, but it works well enough for quick sketches as it flows so freely, at least it does until the tip gets worn down, which happens long before it reaches the 1,800 metre mark the way I use it.
I inadvertently scanned this lightning sketch of Tilly (below) curling around in her grooming routine at a higher resolution than I intended but I like the way you can see the variety in the lines when you see it at this scale, about four times the original size:
Like all my drawings this week, it’s a bit on the scrappy side but as Tilly was moving so continuously during her grooming session there wasn’t an option for a measured drawing.
I can see that I’ve reverted to a kind of scribbly nonsense writing to represent her curly black hair on her back. You could almost read it as ‘lattélllls’.
And we have had a lot of lattés this week. After so many pen sketches, this morning at the Waterside Kitchen at Newmillerdam as we waited for our lattés I went straight into watercolour – no initial drawing, not even in pencil – sky first then, after letting that dry, the trees.
I THINK of English Oaks like this as being great galleons of trees with masses of dense dark foliage but as I sketched this one in wet-on-wet watercolour I realised that there’s a lot of empty space in that canopy.
This is the last page in my little travel booklet sketchbook and I’m now going to make myself a European passport-sized sketchbook, which is one centimetre shorter than the traditional Moleskine notebook. That should fit snugly into my mini-art-bag, which is intended as a passport wallet.
I’ll be using a whiter paper than this, which will make it easier to scan but I’ve enjoyed using this Hahnemuehle sketch paper. It’s more absorbent than the cartridge that I’m used to so watercolour washes soak in almost instantly, instead of lying on the surface. It gives a mat granular quality to the watercolour. This isn’t all that obvious in my same size scans but you can get an idea from this close up of a part of my drawing just 18 millimetres across in which you can see the individual fibres of the paper.
IT RARE for me to produce any kind of print so I took the opportunity of joining the children who were making monoprints from thin sheets of expanded polystyrene in the Faceless theatre company tent at today’s Horbury Show. My friend John Welding has designed the artwork on the tent, which is a cross between a bouncy castle and a large igloo so I decided to draw that as simply as I could on paper (along with the Faceless 9ft tall Heron and accompanying Ornithologist, who had just made a tour of the showground), then traced it through to the other side of the paper to get a reversed image, before scoring the lines through onto the polystyrene.
I’d greatly overestimated the ability of the bobbly textured polystyrene to produce a fine line so John’s design of interlinked hands doesn’t show at all but, there you are, a finished print in 30 minutes or so.
The Boathouse
We took a walk around Newmillerdam this afternoon and discovered that the Friends of Newmillerdam were serving hot drinks and cakes so I was able to sit and sketch an oak tree from a cafe table at the lakeside.
I DREW this with my 08 nib Pilot Drawing Pen and made a start adding the colour as I waited in the queue for advice from a government helpline. After all the waiting, it turned out it was a problem of my own making but at least the hands free phone gave me an interval to sketch. I keep thinking that all the work that I put into mundane tasks like accounts and tax returns will eventually give me some freedom but at this rate by the time I get all the loose ends tied up it will be time to start all over again.
In this view of the woods there’s a Sycamore in full leaf on the far right with an oak just coming into leaf behind it. There’s dark green ivy on the boughs of the big Ash tree on the left, the branches of which are dotted with the Ash flowers, now going to seed, and its fresh green leaves. At the bottom left by the little store house there’s a Blackthorn bush, which was in blossom a few weeks ago.
In my efforts to catch the subtlety of the greens which are actually made up of a stipple of different colours I’ve ended up with an autumnal cast to my watercolour. When I compare the finished result with the actual view from my studio window the real foliage is a fresh light green. I’ve added too much ochre and the odd touch of crimson. There might be traces of both those colours in the barely perceptible flowers, twigs and buds but the foliage is the predominant colour.
You’d have to go for a pointillist technique of lots of tiny dots of pure colour to reproduce the experience of all the colour that you can see but in washes of watercolour you’ve got to average it out and any attempt to introduce those flecks of red and brown will simply dull down the dominant pure greens of the spring foliage.
FEMALE CATKINS of the Pussy Willow – also known as the Goat Willow or Sallow, Salix caprea, are starting to release their fluffy thistledown-like seeds.
This willow is dioecious, meaning unisexual. An individual Pussy Willow will have either all male or all female catkins. Pollen is distributed on the wind so pollination and seed-dispersal has mainly taken place before the leaves unfurl, obstructing windblown pollen or seeds.
The shape and size of this beetle is a good match for the leaf buds.
THIS TREE by the old mineral railway bridge over the River Calder at Addingford mystifies me every year. It’s the combination of catkins, which I associate with willows, with broader, glossy, bright green leaves that don’t look willow-like. I stop to draw the details and my best guess is that it’s Black Poplar, Populus nigra, a tree introduced to Britain from Europe.
Chiffchaffs are now singing in the trees and bushes on the old railway embankment, along with Chaffinches. I sketch a Long-tailed Tit which flits amongst the branches as I’m drawing.
Despite its loud and cheerful song, I have difficulty spotting a Chaffinch in a hedge.
The song is so conspicuous that I expect the bird to be conspicuous too; I look in the top branches but, no, it’s singing from half way up in the hedge 12 or 15 feet tall hedge.
I think this must be the preferred height for a song post for Chaffinches because fifty yards along there’s another one, singing from exactly the same height.
I’d usually walk straight into Horbury up Quarry Hill alongside the busy A642 but I decide to give myself a bit more time today, to walk via the quiet towpath, derelict railway and Addingford Steps, returning alongside Slazenger’s playing fields and the riverbank (right). This stile is little more than 10 minutes walk, via Wynthorpe Road and across the bypass, from Horbury High Street. New footpath signs direct you to Thornes downstream or Netherton across the valley.
Our neighbour's weeping willow gets cut back every two years but this year the pollarded trunk is to go too, to make way for a new shed.
UNUSUALLY FOR me, I’m doing a short spot of child-minding this afternoon, looking after Peter next door who’s had chicken pox and his baby sister who hasn’t while his mum does the school run, picking up his big sister.
‘What do I do if they wake up?’ I ask in alarm.
‘There are custard creams in that box, give them one of those and they’ll be your friend for life.’
Luckily I don’t have to ply them with custard creams as they don’t emerge until their mum gets back.
‘Shall we look for the peacock?’ Peter asks his big sister Alice.
She corrects him (as big sisters often do); ‘It’s not a peacock, it’s a Pheasant.’
Yes but I can see why he thinks of it as a peacock; our resident cock Pheasant’s plumage is splendidly colourful and he struts around as proudly as a peacock.
IT’S NOT LOOKING good for our Ash trees. The fungus, Chalara fraxinea, that has killed around 90% of Ash trees in Denmark and in other parts of Europe has spread here, with cases reported from several locations in Yorkshire. 
It’s hard to think of this familiar view from my studio without those two tall Ashes on the edge of the wood, the one on the right thickly covered in ivy. As I type this two Magpies have flown into its top branches.
Ash saplings soon colonised a rock fall in the old quarry in the wood; they prefer well drained, even rubbly soils, for example the steep little roadside embankment leading to the bridge over the railway at the bottom of Quarry Hill.
It’s hard to imagine the West Yorkshire countryside without Ash trees – they grow like weeds in the right habitat, and their wavy limbs are a wayward contrast to the dominant sturdy but rather dour Sessile Oak. I feel that they’ve got a central role in north country folklore because of their place in Viking mythology.
