Category: Uncategorized

Do you say . . . ?

Do you say that I was on the list
yeah I know but that is on the list
down there in the bulkhead
and it’s not that cauliflower

pictures in attic

Tony how pineapple go
Dale scar lucerne cauliflower
Englishtown crop
Janets Foss motor Cal from friends seaside.

de Z cow utter grouse
strands geranium juniper
Rattlebox free shoes at garden hellebore
Roger I’ll flax

Jesse cauliflower and bread lobster
the meadow deep in the world squirrels
Watership Down fox
Castro rabbit Chapel

Nope, we couldn’t make sense of it either. It was our first attempt at dictating a note on an iPhone as we made a stock check of drawings and paintings in the attic.

Dog Lichen

Dog Lichen

Dog Lichen, Peltigera sp., grows in damp, badly drained habitats such as mossy logs and rocks but it can also get established on garden lawns. Its leafy lobes have white dog-tooth-shaped root-like rhizines on their undersurface, loosely connecting them to the substrate.

There are several similar species, so I’ve posted my original photograph on iSpot Nature, ispotnature.org, to get a second opinion on the specie: perhaps it’s P. membranacea, rather than P. canina itself? It was taken last April in the marshy woodland beyond Friar’s Crag, Derwent Water.

With those dog-like ‘teeth’ it was once used in an attempt to treat rabies.

Urban Watercolor Sketching

Scheinberger 'Urban Watercolor Sketching'I’m aware that I get set in my ways so Felix Scheinberger’s Urban Watercolour Sketching made perfect holiday reading when we were in the Dales a few weeks ago. It’s a short refresher course in watercolour, one that I’ll dip into again.

This is an illustrator’s approach and the examples are almost exclusively pen and ink and watercolour rather than pure watercolour, which suits me because that’s invariably the way I work.

The English watercolour  tradition is wistully rural, going back via John Piper and Beatrix Potter to Girtin and Cotman so it’s refreshing to have Scheinberger go through the rudiments of watercolour so briskly and thoroughly from a streetwise, rather punkish perspective.

Considering Colour

It’s a great opportunity for me to reconsider all the aspects of watercolours that I’m familiar and a few that had never occurred to me. For instance, I like the way he champions indigo and Naples yellow; colours which I’ve dismissed because of their apparent disadvantages. Disadvantages which he suggests can be turned to your advantage for certain subjects. Must try them.

As an illustrator I like the way he rounds off the book by touching on page design, developing ideas and the perennial question of ‘how much is your picture worth?’

As for the urban element, I’m afraid that he can’t convince me that I’d enjoy painting a prefab block of apartments in Romania more than an old farm Provence, but I can see what he’s getting at.

Link; Felix Scheinberger; his website, which, by the way, is in German.

Buttercup

buttercup   corollaThis creeping buttercup is growing at the edge of our little meadow but leaves of meadow buttercup are starting to show in the middle.

As you can see from the notes, I’m making attempts to learn a bit more about botany and I’ve just finished reading a book that has been sitting unread on my shelves since the 1970s, Plants in Action, which accompanied a BBC television series.

Dicots and Monocots

Dandelion flower-bud
Dandelion flower-bud

It’s makes a good introduction but inevitably some of the botany is now out of date. Looking at a more recent publication, Dorling Kindersley’s The Natural History Book, points out that three-quarters of the world’s plants, including buttercups and dandelions, are now classified as Eudicotyledons, not Dicotyledons as they were previously.

The old division was between the ‘dicots’, which had two seed-leaves and the ‘monocots’, which had just the one. Some of the earliest flowering plants to appear in the fossil record are now classified as Basal Angiosperms and Magnoliids.

There are some familiar present-day species in these ancient groups including water lilies, bay, star anise and magnolia.

Mallards and Beech Mast

Top end of Newmillerdam woods this afternoon.
Top end of Newmillerdam woods this afternoon.

WE WERE surprised to see so many Mallards, about 50 of them, in the wood at Newmillerdam this afternoon, feeding under beech trees on the slope above the eastern shore of the lake. It has evidently been a good year for beechmast.

mallards

moorhen in MidgleyAnd talking of water-birds in uncharacteristic places, we passed a moorhen, pecking at the turf of the grass verge on the double-bend by the Black Bull at Midgley. I imagine that there must be a pond hidden away somewhere nearby.

Goosanders

goosandersThat was on Saturday and on Saturday morning, before breakfast, I had the best bird tick that I’ve ever had while sitting on the sofa with a cup of tea; four goosanders flew across our street, heading towards the Calder.

Although they were a hundred yards or more away, the low morning sun picked out the blocky ‘black and white’ pattern on their underwings. My first thought, even though I knew it was wrong, was Shelduck but a quick look through the book proved that the goosander is the only duck with the white wing-square that I’d seen. Other ducks tend to have streaks or bands of white running along the wing. Even its close relative the Red-breasted Merganser differs slightly by having the white wing-square divided by black line.

goosandersApart from the Mallard, the Goosander is the duck that I see most often on the Calder.

November Woods

Newmillerdam woodsNewmillerdam country park, 9.30 a.m., LIGHTING CHANGES so quickly. In the minute or two that it took to take out my camera, a bank of clouds had risen, dulling the dappled autumnal sidelighting of the path.

By that time the couple with the dog who I thought would add scale to the picture had disappeared so far into the perspective that they look more like Borrowers than hobbits in my picture.

peacock
The peacocks at Charlotte’s ice cream parlour, Whitley, have moulted their long tail feathers and are now starting to regrow them. As you can see these are tail-coverts; the stiff tail feathers themselves come down below the rail.

This effect is exaggerated because the only way that I had to steady my camera was to rest it on my knee. The low angle flattens the path which, if I’d been able to take the photograph from eye level, would have led the eye into the composition.

 

Ducks are a Dabbling

mallards
I FEEL BAD walking out to discourage the pair of mallards from making themselves at home in our pond but mallards are doing fine on the river, lakes and dams locally but I’m getting increasingly worried about our local frogs. Will we see them return when the warm weather reaches us this weekend.

Hop Trefoil

THIS CLOVER-LIKE trefoil scrambles amongst grasses and taller herbs. It’s leaves are more elongated than clover. I’m guessing that it’s Hop Trefoil but there are a number of similar species, so I need to take a closer look. One of the advantages of having a patch of meadow at the end of the garden is that it is easy to do that.

Yellow Rattle hasn’t yet shown up in the section of the meadow that I sowed this spring but I can see 10 plants, mainly gone to seed, in a square yard of the established turf that I laid down. It’s a vital part of the wild flower mix as it is semi-parasitic on grasses, preventing them from dominating the meadow.

The Ionian Sea

OUR BALCONY looks out towards the rugged limestone hills of the Greek mainland across the calm (while we were there) Ionian Sea. Every evening and morning there were a few small fishing boats about. I was impressed by the variety of fish at the fish stalls by the harbour; anchovies and sardines, the occasional pipefish, Red Scorpion-fish, still alive but gasping in their crate, which the fishermen warned us were difficult to prepare, a swordfish and other species which looked vaguely familiar but which I couldn’t put a name to. I did feel that some of the fish were rather small, particularly the swordfish which was little more than eighteen inches long including the sword. Hope that’s not an indication of overfishing. If you’ve caught a small swordfish, I guess that it’s then too late throw it back in to grow to adult size, so it might as well be eaten.

Common Wall Lizard, Podarcis muralis, this lizard with an orange underside and blue beneath the chin is the one that we see basking at the edge of the pavement as we walk into Benitses.

Naked Man Orchid

The Naked Man Orchid, Orchis italica, is found throughout the Mediterranean on grassy slopes, as here amongst the olives and cyrpresses, and in heathy garrigue and maquis habitats. Edward Lear was an enthusiastic visitor to Corfu and made watercolour sketches here. These flowers, with ‘arms’, ‘legs’ and anatomical details, remind me of the species Manypeeplia upsidedownia in his Nonsense Botany.

According to Collins Complete Guide to Mediterranean Wildlife, Red Helleborine, Cephalanthera rubra, ‘favours dry, shady woodlands, invariably on calcareous soils’, which is a good description of this clearing amongst the olives.

A Blue Pimpernel

The intense blue put me off but I should have realised that this flower growing by a dry path on an east-facing slope through the olives is a relative of our Scarlet Pimpernel, that grows in similar situations back home. It’s Anagallis foemina.