Richard Bell's nature sketchbook since 1998
‘Versatile, bee-friendly, drop-dead gorgeous,’ foxgloves are the cover star of this month’s RHS ‘Garden’ magazine.
They self seed around the garden and we’ve got more than usual this year as we haven’t cleared them from the veg beds, which we’re revamping this year.
This opium (not Himalayan) poppy had seeded itself on one of the veg beds, so I’ve transferred it to my plants for pollinators bed and it seems to be settling in.
This foxglove rosette will be relocated too, when we put in the runner beans and dwarf French.
The Silkwood Farm, Junction 40, Ossett: Pigeons and a magpie fly over a square of grassy waste ground between the vehicle testing centre and the snack van. Over the past year as we’ve driven past, I’ve looked forward to being back here again with Barbara’s brother John, after a morning’s walk around Newmillerdam. It feels good to be able to do something normal again and with the tables set out with social distancing in mind there’s a relaxed, airy ambience.
Of course I’ll draw them when they’re in flower, but I like foxgloves at this stage, with the cluster of flower buds beginning to unfurl.
My company as I draw this on my wild flower patch at the end of the garden includes a female sparrow picking over the wood chip path, a blackbird singing behind me over the hedge, a dunnock giving its hurried trill and a jumping spider checking out my legs. I’m wearing shorts so I can track its progress over my hairy legs without looking up from my drawing, so I miss its daring leap from knee to knee.
The rosette of leaves at the foot of the plant also makes an interesting subject. But I will draw those flowers as they appear over the next few weeks.
As we continue under high pressure, it’s been cold – sometimes down to below freezing on a night – and very dry. That hasn’t been a problem for the spurge, growing in my wild flower patch at the bottom of the garden. I guess that the milky, corrosive sap must work well as an anti-freeze and is perhaps one of the reasons that spurges do well in dry habitats, for instance in the dry, sometimes dusty, soil in the raised bed in our greenhouse.
It isn’t the most popular of plants with pollinators: during the hour or so that I’m drawing I notice only two insect visitors, both small flies, one a species of hoverfly. The small bumble bee in my sketch was working its way around the flowerhead of a dandelion.
We’re on coal measures rocks, so mainly shales and sandstones, which usually weather into slightly acid soils.
The foxglove is typical of dry acid soils and it self-seeds and thrives amongst our flower borders and veg beds so, as a change from trying to establish a patch of traditional English meadow on my wild flower patch, I’m going with the flow and planting out the foxglove seedlings transplanted from where they’ve sprung up to create a woodland edge habitat.
Our first visitor since March: Barbara’s sister Susan joins us for a socially-distanced coffee and bran loaf in our back garden. This group of foxgloves were self-sown but they’ve positioned themselves perfectly in the border. Thanks to lockdown, we’re more ahead in the garden than ever before and yesterday we made a trip to the garden centre to buy enough pollinator-friendly plants to fill the last gaps in the border.
During the last three months we haven’t set foot in anyone else’s house, with the exception of Barbara’s brother John, who needed our assistance on a couple of occasions.
I’ve been putting my enforced spare time to good use by giving myself a refresher course in illustration and getting a bit more familiar with the work of illustrators, photographers and designers through the daily podcasts from Adobe, but I could soon get back into my usual sketchbook habit. I feel that what I’ve learnt over the past few months feeds into my regular observational drawing, even if that’s something as familiar as drawing a foxglove in the back garden.
Instead of weeding out these foxglove seedlings, I’m saving them for my meadow area.
Chicory tends to take over from most of the wild flowers that I try to introduce but foxgloves stand a fighting chance as they colonise open woodland and burnt areas and they prefer dry or moist acid soils. I’m not going to be able to establish the kind of wild flower meadow that you’d find on chalk downland but I should have more success in creating a woodland edge habitat.
These lush weeds grow in a corner of the cold frame. As I draw, there’s a confrontation between two pairs of magpies with a lot of irate clacking. They meet on our chimney and two of the rivals lock feet together and roll down the roof tiles. The dispute moves on to the next door neighbour’s roof and, as I pack in, 
I can see them in the top of one of the ash trees in the wood, joined by at least two more magpies and a carrion crow who seems to be just an onlooker.