Beech at Newmillerdam, drawn this morning with the constant accompaniment of cooing wood pigeons and the occasional clatter of a beech nut dropping from the still-green canopy.
Trees are their Roots
Tag: Beech
Holmfield Beech
In Holmfield Park, adjoining Thornes and Clarence Parks in Wakefield, this old beech has so far escaped damage in storms. So many beeches in the area are getting to that 150 to 200 year old stage when they start shedding boughs. Let’s hope that this one still has decades of life left in it.
On Saturday we met up with family at the Holmfield Arms, in Holmfield House, a Victorian mansion which was once gifted to the city and housed the local museum.
The cross-bedded sandstone is the wall of what is now an orangery style room in the Brewers’ Fair restaurant. It overlooks a terrace surrounded by shrubs and trees, including a lime (lower left on my sketch above). Varieties of lime that grew in a columnar shape were popular with the Victorians.
I drew more Victorian trees in Horbury. Some of these are getting to the end of their natural lives and have shed branches, or on the odd occasion been blown down in storms.
Beech Backdrop
This morning at Newmillerdam I drew the fishing platform for the opening frame of my Ode to a Duck cartoon and photographed a beech tree for this background for the squirrel/wood pigeon duo. You can already sense the natural chemistry between them.
Slush and Showers
Just 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.