It’s forecast to be the warmest day of the week but sitting in the shade at the foot of a woodland slope at Newmillerdam it’s like having air conditioning as I draw the hogweed.
45 minutes with Hogweed
Tag: hogweed
The Hogweed Jungle
Monday morning and I’m back drawing by the tangle of hogweed, hemlock, nettle, dock and cleavers at Newmillerdam car park.
The Mousy Scent of Hemlock
Newmillerdam car park, 19℃ 68℉, humid and overcast: Luxuriant should-high hogweed, nettle, creeping thistle, curled dock and growing to 8ft, hemlock with cleavers scrambling amongst the stems. Several species of hoverfly are attracted to the umbels of hogweed or resting on leaves.
Working under an umbrella, the patter of rain on the fabric reminds me of when I occasionally camped out in my one-man tent but any fresh smell of summer rain is cancelled out from the strong smell of mice from the hemlock.
Hogweed
Hogweed is now in full flower alongside the car park at Newmillerdam.
When I first got into botany, hogweed and cow parsley were in the Umbelliferae along with their garden relatives, carrot, celery and parsley. The preferred family name today is Apiaceae, after Apium, the name that Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder used for celery-like plants.
WordPress tells me that today I’ve posted 365 days in a row, and suggests that I should keep up the good work.
Dock and Hogweed
I happen to like fjords, I think they give a lovely baroque feel to a continent.
Slartibartfast, a venerable Magrathean planetary designer in Douglas Adams’ ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’, 1978
I feel the same way as Slartibartfast about the crinkled leaf edges and the swashbuckling flamboyance of unfurling leaf-buds of curled dock. They give this common weed an air of baroque bravado.
Meanwhile back at the Hogweed
I’ve been following the progress of this hogweed from the emerging bud two weeks ago to the first umbels last week.
Three weeks ago, on the 9th of May I could step across the herbage at the edge of the car park to draw the unfurling bracken and garlic mustard. They’ve now been overtaken by dock, nettle and hogweed, what you might call rank vegetation except that today, after a short shower of rain (during which I continued drawing under the shelter of a large umbrella) there was deliciously fresh smell of spring vegetation.
Curled Dock
Curled dock, Rumex crispus, growing at the edge of the car park at Newmillerdam, is a common weed of rough ground, farmland and the sea shore.
Nearby another weed of rough ground, hogweed, Heracleum sphondylium, was starting to unfurl its leaves from large, hairy sheathes.