The first day of summer, so I thought it was time that I got back to my A5 landscape format sketchbook.
Broad Bean, Basil and Tomato
Tag: Basil
Horseshoe Geranium
The horseshoe geranium, more accurately known as the zonal pelargonium, is a hybrid species whose wild ancestors grew in Mediterranean climate zones. Because it wasn’t suited to surviving our winters, gardeners used to keep it going through the winter as stem cuttings. This can mean the expense of heating a greenhouse and there is the possibility of plants being susceptible to virus, so it’s more usual these days to grow it from seed.
Our neighbour has grown some this year and gave us this plant as a small seedling. It wasn’t too happy growing on our kitchen windowsill and its leaves turned red. We’ve discovered this was probably because it was getting too cold at night. It’s thriving now though in its small pot. Apparently if you give them too large a pot, they put their efforts into vegetative growth instead of flowering.
The flowers have no scent but the leaves have a pungency that reminds me of dustiness. This probably dates back to my childhood experience of geraniums, which were often leggy plants growing on dusty windowsills in primary schools.
The cold hasn’t just affected our indoor geranium: the sweet peas have been very slow to start flowering and the three stems in this bottle are the first we’ve picked.
Basil
We should be self-sufficient in pesto this year because our basil seedlings have got off to a good start. We discovered that the ones we’d potted on did better on the kitchen windowsill than in the greenhouse, probably because we had some cool nights.
Basil, African Blue
Basil never seems very happy in our garden so we’re going to see if this African Blue variety does any better.
Pencil and watercolour isn’t normally my thing but I’m currently reading Agathe Ravet-Haevermans’ Drawing Nature, so I’m giving her favourite media a try.
She works as a botanical draughtsman at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris and her approach has a typically French analytical edge. She suggests that you should start by looking for the axis for a plant or an individual leaf;
‘To make the drawing a coherent whole, you must always draw the axis first and the surrounding elements after’
This is rather different to my approach to observational drawing where I map out shapes and the negative spaces between them, trusting that the whole plant will then look convincing.
Greek Basil
GREEK BASIL, also known as Bush Basil, Ocimum minimum, has smaller leaves than the more familiar kitchen herb Sweet Basil, Ocimum basilicum. We’re looking after a little Grecian urn of Bush Basil for a neighbour, which has started to flower (left).
Ocimum is from the Greek okimom meaning ‘aromatic herb’. Basils are members of the Labiate family; relatives of mint, thyme, woundwort and dead-nettle.
Writing about Sweet Basil Culpeper says;
‘This is the herb which all authors are together by the ears about, and rail at one another, like lawyers. Galen and Dioscorides hold it not fitting to be taken inwardly, and Chrysippus rails at it with downright Billingsgate rhetoric : Pliny and the Arabian Physicians defend it.’
From this, I guess that Culpeper had some first-hand experience of lawyers and of Billingsgate fishmongers. Basil is such an integral part of the healthy Mediterranean cuisine that today it seems inconceivable that it was ever regarded with such suspicion:
‘Mizaldus affirms, that being laid to rot in horse-dung, it will breed venomous beasts. Hilarius, a French physician, affirms upon his own knowledge, that an acquaintance of his, by common smelling of it, had a scorpion bred in his brain. . .
‘I dare write no more of it.’