Category: Trees

Leaf Skeletons

poplar leaffirst celandineThe poplar leaves by the lock on the Leeds Liverpool canal at Gargrave have all but turned to leaf mould, leaving fragmentary leaf skeletons.

On a south-facing bank by the road I see my first celandines of the year bursting into flower, pushing up amongst their dark green heart-shaped leaves and the dried stems of last year’s growth.

wall

garden snailsAt the foot of this gritstone wall I pick up a couple of garden snail shells to draw. Inside a third shell I find another species of snail sheltering. Compared to the garden snail this one has a more flattened spiral, rather like an ammonite.

snail shell

Poplar twig

Ash Trees

ash treesToday’s snow showers have been punctuated by brighter intervals but it doesn’t seem worth going out and clearing the driveway as the thin slushy layer that has accumulated here is likely to melt away in rain showers and warmer temperatures tomorrow. I hope that the forecast is right and that it won’t freeze solid and need scraping off laboriously.
pheasantThe snow brings a cock pheasant to our bird feeders and I guess that, now he’s discovered us, he’ll become a regular. Other colourful visitors today have included bullfinch, chaffinch, goldfinch and greenfinch.
I enjoyed drawing with my dip pen with the Tower Pen nib so much yesterday evening that I wanted to try it on a landscape and, as it would have been an uncomfortable business to set myself up outdoors I goldfinchdrew the view from my studio window. I’d hoped to include the snow-covered meadow but the sun was soon masked by the next bank of cloud approaching from the northwest and it was getting late in the afternoon anyway so I confined myself to the silhouette of the ash trees against the eastern sky.

Slush and Showers

beechJust what you’d expect for mid-January; grey slush underfoot and sleety showers drifting through every twenty or thirty minutes. Not a day to go out drawing, so this multi-trunked beech was drawn in centrally heated comfort, when we visited my mum. It was easier to draw during the gloomier periods; once the low midday winter sun came through, tree and shrubbery disappeared into a formless mass of twiggy darkness with the glistening highlights of drooping boughs etched across it.

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Atlas Cedar

scale of cone‘Mature cones of the blue Atlantic cedar are plump and pink-brown, sitting up like over-fed skittles on the boughs of brush-like blue foliage’cedar cone

Hugh Johnson, The International Book of Trees, 1973

kew gardens kew urnApart from starting to sketch one of the urns on Victoria Gate at Kew Gardens, I didn’t get to do any drawing. We met up with friends and, as it was so cold, we kept on the move, popping into the greenhouses to warm up. My glasses steamed up instantly as we entered the palm house!

I picked up these pieces of the cones of the Atlas cedar, Cedrus atlantica, to draw back in our hotel room. The scalecones are described as dehiscent, meaning that they burst or gape open, scattering these scales on the ground below.

Atlas cedar grows on the northern flanks of the Atlas and Riff mountains of Morocco and Algeria. They can grow to forty metres.

cone‘In Morocco’s Atlas mountains, macaque monkeys clamber among the cedars and scamper across the ground in search of roots.’scale

David Attenborough, The First Eden,  The Mediterranean World and Man, 1987.

The first photograph in Attenborough’s book shows an Atlas cedar with macaques resting on its boughs, a surprising contrast of conifer – which I’d associate with temperate or northern boreal climate zones – and African animal.

Be a Tree

crab apple4.55 pm; Blackbirds are alarming as the gloom of sunset fades out the remaining colour in our back garden. Not that we can see the sun setting; it’s remained cloudy with varying degrees of gloom all day.

In contrast to the twilight mood, the golden hornet crab apple by the pond is bubbling with pale yellow fruits, festooned with golden baubles.

In movement and dance, school children are asked to be a tree. What kind of tree would you be if you decided to be an autumnal golden hornet?

Although it is stretching to the skies in classic tree-mime fashion, those awkwardly bent limbs suggest that it might be attempting to support the firmament – like the Viking cosmic tree – rather than reaching for the sky in hopeful supplication.

A couple of broken paving slabs that I’ve leant against the raised bed give the impression in my sketch that the crab might have used those scraggly limbs to scrabble and scrooge up from an underground lair, like Mole in The Wind in the Willows.

Dripped in Ink

sketchbook and notebookDrawn, or rather dripped, in bamboo pen using Daler-Rowney Calli waterproof ink, the drawing is so blotty that it will take days to dry, so I’m photographing it rather than laying it on the scanner. And thank goodness I didn’t use my regular sketchbook and put that out of action.

As I got inky fingers opening the bottle, I thumbprinted the basic shape of the main stem on the blank page before I started the drawing. I decided that might take away the some of the scariness of the blank white sheet while working against the clock.

I started at at five to four and called it a day after fifteen minutes.

Cathedral Plane Trees

maplesI’ve got a chance to linger over coffee at a table overlooking the cathedral precinct listening to a song I’ve never heard before, but which could provide a theme-tune for the urban sketcher;

‘Pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag
And bury them in the sea . . .’

Sung by Lloyd Wade in the song by Eliza Doolittle. In my case, I can pack up my troubles in my A5 art-bag.

A friend spots me and tells me that she’s finding watercolour painting a wonderful escape from some ongoing medical problems in her family that she’s been coping with for years.

Nothing could be more therapeutic than sitting here with a latte, a toasted teacake and a sketchbook.

Mac Maple

mapleMaple syrup pancakes, a mocha and a maple tree. A suitably leafy outlook for my morning break. The man with the blue gloves is about to shampoo the driveway of McDonald’s, here at the Cathedral Retail Park, Wakefield.

I added the red sign as a spot of colour contrast then realised that it’s in the wrong place; Staples office supplies store is over to the right but they’ve just put up their sign on the store that was left empty following the collapse of electrical retailer Comet a year ago.

tree topsRather than abandon the Wainwright sketchbook with the absorbent paper, I’ve been looking through my pens, trying a Mitsubishi Uni Power Tank ballpoint for these tree tops and a Sharpie Liquid Pencil for the Mac’s maple.

blue chairI’m longing to settle down to some real drawing with more sympathetic drawing materials but at the moment I’ve got a lot of waiting rooms and wards to visit so it’s a good opportunity to finish off my current so-so sketchbook.

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Willow

willow9.47 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.

Turkey Oak

Turkey oak

I’d been presented with a blue ballpoint pen at Horbury Street Fair so I used it to add a tone to represent the foliage of the Turkey oak in Barbara’s sister’s front garden.

cushionsIt was something of a family day as I’d drawn this when we called on her brother this morning. In between I was keen to head for the creperie stall at the Street Fair but, you know what these events are like, we kept getting held up by friends we hadn’t seen for months!

But the banana and Nutella crepe was worth waiting for.

Ten years ago Danny Gregory was with us for the weekend and we sat and drew at Horbury Street Fair.

Link; Sketchbook Skool link in Danny Gregory’s Blog

Ash Bank

Ash saplings
Ash sapling on the banking behind the Dam Inn.

treesWE SAW two great-crested grebes the last time we walked by the lake at Newmillerdam but I’m sorry not to spot them today. I hope they’re nesting in some hidden backwater. Much in evidence are the black-headed gulls, every one of them now in breeding plumage.

In our back garden this afternoon the grey male sparrowhawk zooms into the bottom of the hedge. Twenty or thirty seconds later he pops up again from our neighbour’s side arcing over so swiftly that for a moment he’s flying upside down.

Emerging unsuccessfully again from our neighbour’s side he leaves the hedge with nothing, sitting for a few minutes on next door’s sumac. If it wasn’t being anthropomorphic, I’d say that there was distinct look of grumpiness in his hunched silhouette.

He flies over the corner of the meadow to the wood, putting up a flock of goldfinches and sending the wood pigeons into clattering panic from the ivy-covered ash trees.

wood pigeonThe ivy berries on next door’s front garden fence must be at their best because for much of the day a wood pigeon is contentedly eating them.

blue titThe blue tits are showing an interest again in the nestbox on the back of house.

mole hill

With the snow gone and the pheasants and wood pigeons trampling the border beneath the bird feeder I was beginning to think that all mole activity had ceased. Late this afternoon the mole started re-excavating its tunnel system and we watched as it piled up the earth by the edge of the lawn, obviously coming very near the surface but never once showing itself.