Chicory

A couple of stems of chicory escaped when I mowed the meadow area, but I might as well enjoy drawing them while they’re still here. They’re going to go as I need to keep it under control to give some of the other wild flowers, such as bird’s-foot trefoil, red campion and red clover, a chance to thrive.

Perhaps I should start eating it: buds and leaves are edible and the roots have been baked, ground and roasted as a substitute for coffee. I can’t see me giving up my Fairtrade, rain-forest friendly latte.

Chicory and Dock

I OCCASIONALLY feel the need to do what I call an ‘inky’ drawing, with free-flowing ink, so why not go all the way and use a bamboo pen and Winsor & Newton black Indian ink?

Disadvantages;

  • once you’ve dipped your bamboo pen in the ink, the first time you hold it over the paper a drop of ink will blot down onto the paper
  • you can’t take your time drawing the lines while the ink is running freely or you’ll end up with another blot
  • the ink soon runs out and you start to get a broken scratchy line

Advantages;

  • you get a bold line, one that reminds me of a woodcut
  • there’s an organic quality to the diminishing size and changing quality of the line as the ink runs out. In the same way that slug slime trails are organic!
  • makes me work more quickly

That last one, ‘makes me work more quickly’ isn’t necessarily an advantage; the main point of observational drawing for me is to slow down and make contact with the natural world (or in some cases the manmade world).

I just try to work as accurately as I can within the limitations of the medium. There’s no rubbing out if a line goes wrong, so you just have to go for it. I’ve never skied but I imagine the feeling of barely controlled chaos that I get when I’m drawing with a piece of sharpened bamboo and blottily viscous ink is similar to the feeling you must get when you first go skiing down the nursery slopes.

Bamboo pen and Indian ink is the white knuckle ride of drawing. Perhaps next time I’ll try the comfy armchair and slippers version of drawing and go back to my ArtPen!

Groundwork: from Z to A

I’M TAKING my time preparing the patch at the end of the garden that I’m hoping to transform into a wild flower meadow. It’s in such an unkempt state because this is the corner that gets used for sorting, shredding and on a couple of occasions burning the debris from trimming hedges, replacing fences and clearing the pond.

Rich disturbed soil like this makes an ideal habitat for a wild flower that I introduced year ago and have often wished that I hadn’t; Chicory. The flowers and the bitter-tasting foliage of this tall, blue-flowered relative of daisies and sunflowers have been eaten in salads and an extract of the roots (and some suggest the seeds too) has been used as a substitute for coffee.

But I’d like our mini-meadow to be diverse rather than being dominated by one plant, however useful it may be, so I’m gradually forking over the area, removing every fragment of root I can spot. This has amounted to four bagfuls of the vermicelli-like ‘roots’. Perhaps I should be turning them into coffee.

After a couple of hours weeding I realise that I need to improve my posture. This is how I picture myself when I’m digging; I feel as if I’m putting a lot of unnecessary strain on my lower back.

A sketch from a photograph that a friend took of me using an edging tool to cut turves on Monday (right) shows that I need to bend even more when I’m using a garden tool with a short handle. Most handles are too short for me, so I’m going to start looking out for a fork with an extra long handle.

On Gardeners’ World presenter Monty Don characteristically stands with his legs apart and now I can see why; the ground is a long way down and with legs apart you can get that bit nearer.

My habitual action when I’ve been digging and want to pick out a weed or rootlet is to bend over, folding myself up in a Z-shape. I guess that it would probably be better for my legs and arms if I adopted an A-shape, legs apart, trying to keep my legs straight, bending at the waist. This stretches my back, and my legs, rather than putting strain on the joints.

I’ve been trying this and I’m convinced that it’s better for my back but I still find myself automatically adopting the ‘Z’ crouch when I need to pick out a piece of root that I’ve just spotted.

“They always say that you should crouch instead of bend,” says Paul, who has helped us out so much in the garden since the autumn.

I guess that you should work in whatever way you find comfortable and that varying your working position is probably a good idea.