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.
At the car park at Cannon Hall a gaggle of about a dozen farmyard geese, mainly white, graze on the grass verge until a couple of walkers arrive with a bag of breadcrumbs.
The domestic goose is descended from the greylag but stands more upright than its wild relative because it has been selectively bred to be three times as heavy and to accumulate fat around its rear end. One of the geese had a dewlap and a similar flap hanging between its legs. This is a feature of the Toulouse, an old French breed.
In the American Pilgrim goose, males are always white and females grey.
‘Denied the opportunity to forage [geese] are uneconomic,’ writes John Woodward in The Field Guide, ‘for they have large appetites . . . the income derived from geese rarely justifies the use of valuable pasture.’
A toddler with a large bag of breadcrumbs is next in line to feed them.
Jumbo Grip Pencil
Oak at the corner of the car park, Cannon Hall (pen and watercolour).
My drawing is a composite as these geese never keep still. I started with the head and worked down. When the birds set off in a different direction I kept adding to the sketch, transposing the shapes as if I was mirror-writing. Sometimes I’d be drawing one of the white geese, sometimes the one with the dewlap but the greyish-brown geese did have the white rear end, as I’ve drawn it here.
I drew the goose with a Faber-Castell Jumbo Grip pencil (below). With its triangular cross section and its rubberised ‘SoftGRIP’ stipples, this is one pencil that you’re not going drop even if you’re working in gloves. The matching pencil sharpener is easier to use on location than a craft knife. There’s a pencil-thin slot in my art bag that it fits neatly into so it’s not going to lose it’s point by getting jammed in with my pens and watercolours.
I’ve used various clutch pencils, otherwise known as propelling pencils, but they don’t have the bite of a real pencil. The Jumbo Grip is rated B for hardness and is described as ‘ideal for learning to write’. But I like it for drawing too.
When we drop our car in for its annual service in Hunslet we like to walk alongside the River Aire to Leeds and make a day of it. Over the years on the river we’ve seen goosander, mallard, teal, cormorant, moorhen and kingfisher. We’ve seen goldfinches feeding on the cones of the riverside alders and a wagtail flitting about on a landing stage. Last year we saw our first warbler of the season, just flown in from Africa.
One year we met a knight walking his charger along the riverside path. This was at the time that the Royal Armouries Museum at Clarence Dock staged regular jousts in a tiltyard next to the museum.
I sketched the Birds of the Aire (left) on our first walk into Leeds from the garage, eleven years ago (on the same date, the 9th, and the same day of the week, a Wednesday).
Rain all day means that, for the first time, we miss out on our annual riverside ramble and content ourselves with dodging in and out of the shops in the city centre for a few hours. The art material stores of my college days in Leeds, Dinsdales and Jowett and Sowry have now moved out of the city centre so we were delighted to come across a new(ish) art and craft materials store, Fred Aldous, behind Leeds Market as you head towards Leeds Parish Church (now restyled as the Minster).
Naturally I have to buy a sketchbook. Will the acid free paper in the pocket-sized Leuchtturm 1917 notebook prove more sympathetic to watercolour than the Moleskine sketchbooks that I was using last year? It’s going to be a while before I get around to trying it as I’m currently using my Derwent Black Journal as a pocket notebook, carrying it in my pocket along with a Lamy Vista pen and a small wallet of children’s crayons. I used it when drawing the trees as we waited for our car after its service at the Luscombe’s Suzuki.
This polypody fern is growing as an epiphyte on a crooked old hawthorn on by the nature trail at the National Coal Mining Museum, Caphouse Colliery. Epiphyte is simply a plant that grows on another plant: the fern isn’t parasitic on the hawthorn. This reminds me of the mysterious Wistman’s Wood on Dartmoor where old stunted oaks grow up amongst massive tumbled slabs of granite and every surface, rock and tree, is covered with moss, lichen and fern. This is on a much smaller scale of course but it has the advantage for me that its just a couple of miles up the road.
As I shelter under an umbrella, I realise that to draw all the pinnate indentations on each leaf is going to take me a lot longer than the time that I’ve allowed, so I outline all the fronds and decide to come back another day to complete the drawing and add some colour.
From molehills to mountains: the moors on the tops of the Pennines are still covered with snow. We returned to Charlotte’s Ice Cream parlour at Whitely this morning, a regular coffee stop in the days when we had my mum in tow. It was often the one day of the week that she got out and, despite her deteriorating eyesight, she always appreciated the panorama . . . and of course the coffee and the scone.
Over the weekend I noticed that the mole has extended its excavations into the flower border below the bird feeders. For the last few weeks that single molehill, right in the middle of the lawn, had been the only sign of its activity.
If I can infer the layout of its tunnels from the heaps of earth above ground, the main tunnel runs west northwest to east northeast. This is along the contour of the slope. Would a down-slope tunnel be at more risk of flooding?
Red food colouring added to the water and taken up by a plant stem reveals the arrangement of xylem tubes in a cross section. Xylem tubes transport water up the stem from roots to leaves and flowers. These two stems had been left in the solution for two days.
Each yogurt drink container started out with 100 millilitres of water. As you’d expect, the daffodil took up more than the leafless stick of celery, eight millilitres as opposed to the five. There was no detectable evaporation from the container filled with water only.
Monocots and Eudicots
Two seed leaves of a dicot seedling emerging from a cushion of moss on the garage roof.Wall barley, a monocot.
The experiment reveals that the xylem tubes in the daffodil, a monocot, are loosely clustered around the centre of the stem whereas in the celery, a eudicot, the xylem tubes appear more organised, arranged around the central pith along the edge of the stem.
Monocots are flowering plants that are so called because the emerging seedlings have one seed leaf (cotyledon). They typically have parallel veins in their leaves. Monocots include onions, bluebells, grasses and maize.
Dicots have two seed leaves and typically have a network of veins in their leaves.
Eudicot means ‘perfect dicot’. The eudicot clade (group) includes the majority of dicots but excludes basal angiosperms such as hornworts, water lilies, magnolias, avocado* and bay laurel, the herb that gives us bay leaves.
Deceptive Fruits
Avocado eating Megatherium from ‘The Golden Play Book of Animals of the Past Stamps’, a childhood favourite, and still there on my bookshelf!
*We’ve just returned from the farm shop and noticed that on our bill the assistant had misidentified the avocado (Basal Angiosperm;clade Magnoliidae; order Laurales) as a lime (Angiosperm; clade Eudicotyledonae; order, Sapindales). I can see how you could mix these up! We still think that the fruit on the right is an avocado but we won’t feel totally sure until we cut into it. The texture feels different to the lemon; it doesn’t have the same give in it, so it’s not ripe yet.
It’s been suggested that avocados evolved their fruits – which botanically are berries – containing one large seed, to be eaten by large mammals that have since become extinct, such as Megatherium, one of the giant ground sloths.
Links
I’ve been reading various books on botany and enjoying these two online resources:
From Roots to Riches: Our changing relationship with plants over the last 250 years – from tools to exploit, to objects of beauty, to being an essential global resource we have to conserve. Presented by Prof Kathy Willis. BBC Radio 4, Kew Gardens.
E O Wilson’s Life on Earth available as a free download from iBooks. Part 5 introduces Plant Physiology, which includes the experiment to demonstrate the properties of xylem.
Reedbeds seen from the Bittern Hide, 11.40 a.m., 40ºF, 6ºC. The Reedbed hide is just visible in the background.
RSPB Old Moor, 10.40 a.m., 39ºF, 4ºC, Reedbed Hide: We passed through a snow shower on the way here but as we walk to the Reedbed Hide there are only a few sleety spots in the wind.
Two mute swans are upending by the reeds as they make their way to their nest site, a mound of reeds.
A great crested grebe motors over towards the swans, calling as he nears them (judging by the large cheek frills, this is the male). It’s a surprisingly loud call for what I think of as one of the quietest of wildfowl. My bird book describes the grebe’s spring calls as ‘a series of guttural far-reaching “rah-rah-rah” notes’. But, instead of skirmishing with the swans, as we thought he might do, he dives near them. Perhaps when he saw how large they are in close up he decided not to escalate the situation.
Mid-lagoon, two male and one female tufted ducks are diving.
Coxley Beck, Capri car park, 1.50 p.m., 39ºF, 4ºC, sun and showers: This ash and sycamore are growing on top of the steep bank that was once the mill race of a corn mill. The stone embankment has been eroded here, probably by flood damage. On the exposed mud banks fresh leaves are sprouting: dock, dandelion, cow parsley(?), hemlock(?), creeping buttercup, seedlings of himalayan balsam and a clump of snowdrops, which was no doubt washed down from one of the stream-side gardens. Higher up the bank, where it hasn’t been scoured so much by the December floods, there are a few clumps of hart’s tongue fern.
There’s a passing shower but I’ve brought my fishing umbrella so that isn’t a problem. I start adding the watercolour, lightest tones first, and, just when I’ve got those in, the sun comes out again and I’m able to mix in some neutral tint and paint in the shadows.
Coxley Valley, 10 a.m., 30ºF, -2ºC: I cross the beck which is brown with melt water to draw on a flat area that, thirty years ago, was a meadow. Since then alders and crack willows have spread from the side of the beck. At this time of year the leaves of wild garlic are starting to show amongst them but today a centimetre of snow covers the ground. Wet snow patters on my fishing umbrella as I draw ivy and bramble on a fallen willow.
It’s so long since I drew in the snow (as opposed to drawing it as seen through our patio windows) that I record the scene in a photograph and submit it to the BBC Weather Watchers website.
A wren flits across the puddly path as I leave the wood and hops under a bramble; a robin sings despite the snow shower. The song thrush by the path at the edge of the beck isn’t singing but I have heard it at the edge of the wood when I’ve been drawing in the back garden.
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.
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.
Higher up the bank, where it hasn’t been scoured so much by the December floods, there are a few clumps of hart’s tongue fern.
