Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
While pruning the Golden Hornet crab apple I became aware that someone was watching me. Directly overhead a buzzard was hanging in the air, about 100 feet above me.
At the top of the stepladder in the crown of the tree, I had a wood pigeon’s eye-view of our newly-built raised beds.
2.30 p.m., 71℉, 22℃, 100% low grey cloud, slight breeze: I’m taking a break drawing the tumbling knapweed overhanging the pond. Two or three bumblebees work the flowers joined by a green-veined white butterfly.
This morning I had a summer pruning session on the Golden Hornet crab apple, which hasn’t been trimmed for almost two years. As soon as I’d finished, three or four blue tits appeared, foraging amongst the newly exposed clusters of twigs, left where I’ve trimmed off the long, slimmer newer growth.
‘Summer prune for fruit,’ said Monty Don on a recent Gardeners’ Word, ‘winter prune for growth.’
Following on from the blue tits, a sparrowhawk swoops through the crab apple, now able to fly right through the opened up centre of my goblet-shaped tree. It perches for a few seconds, then it’s off across the next garden. It’s small and brown, so we think that it’s an immature female.
43ºF, 8ºC, 10.15 a.m.: In the back garden a robin is singing; a pair of magpies call raucously; a blackbird splutters in alarm and house sparrows chirp continuously from the hedges.
A fragment of shrivelled crab apple drops on my sketchbook, then another. There’s a male blackbird seven feet above my head in the branches of the golden hornet. Blackbirds and thrushes prefer the fruit after the first frosts of winter, when it has started turning brown.
It’s warm enough for me to spot a bluebottle investigating the snowdrops which are now in flower in foamy strands along by the hedge in the meadow area and here by the raised bed behind the pond.
I’ve been reading up on botany recently: the petals and sepals of the snowdrop appear identical so, as in other monocots, they are called tepals. The leaves don’t appear to grow from a stem but there is a short squat stem which lies hidden in the bulb.
4.55 pm; Blackbirds are alarming as the gloom of sunset fades out the remaining colour in our back garden. Not that we can see the sun setting; it’s remained cloudy with varying degrees of gloom all day.
In contrast to the twilight mood, the golden hornet crab apple by the pond is bubbling with pale yellow fruits, festooned with golden baubles.
In movement and dance, school children are asked to be a tree. What kind of tree would you be if you decided to be an autumnal golden hornet?
Although it is stretching to the skies in classic tree-mime fashion, those awkwardly bent limbs suggest that it might be attempting to support the firmament – like the Viking cosmic tree – rather than reaching for the sky in hopeful supplication.
A couple of broken paving slabs that I’ve leant against the raised bed give the impression in my sketch that the crab might have used those scraggly limbs to scrabble and scrooge up from an underground lair, like Mole in The Wind in the Willows.
Drawn, or rather dripped, in bamboo pen using Daler-Rowney Calli waterproof ink, the drawing is so blotty that it will take days to dry, so I’m photographing it rather than laying it on the scanner. And thank goodness I didn’t use my regular sketchbook and put that out of action.
As I got inky fingers opening the bottle, I thumbprinted the basic shape of the main stem on the blank page before I started the drawing. I decided that might take away the some of the scariness of the blank white sheet while working against the clock.
I started at at five to four and called it a day after fifteen minutes.