Since April, around every two or three weeks, Nikki and I have been walking around the same part of Loe pool. We meet after work, head down there, study the same trees and look at the changes. I talk to Nikki about botanical drawing and she discusses photography and horticulture. She makes me look at leaf shapes, bud activity, size variation… We both delight in colour changes.

Over the spring, there was a mass of acid green and acid yellow. This was due to trees such as the Norway Maple adorning the riverside and Goat Willow hiding in the wetland. This was all against a backdrop of yellow-flowering gorse and white-flowering blackthorne. Now, the Yellow Flag Iris Iris pseudacorus is showing yellow, and ‘helicopters’ cling to a large number of trees.

Here’s part of our re-walk forming. When theirwork’s map is editable, I will start adding descriptions for the plants that we are learning.

common alder (2), n 50.09635, w 005.28209
holly (male), n 50.08707, w 005.28550
jay, n 50.02951, w 005.24851
red fungi, n 50.09137, w 005.28367
honey suckle, n 50.09136, w 005.28374
hazle (1), n 50.08831, w005.28377
hazle (2), n 50.08633, w 005.28733
hazle (3), n 50.08591, w 005.28817
yellow flag iris, n 50.09070, w 005.28350

We hope to continue with such walking and build on ideas for recording information. Nikki’s photographing down there anyway, and I have started a new project called ‘Plant and Place’, which will be launched as a long-term botanical art project later this year. This project will be about ’slow drawing’. Botanical work takes a long time, a lot of practice and patience. To inform the work, I am continuing with such training as outlined in one of my posts called slow drawing I have planned to receive further training from Mally Francis to help guide this work. One of the spaces (or one of the places) given to this project will of course be here, this walk at Loe Pool. This work will of course link to theirwork and I hope artwork concerning Loe Pool can feed into the map, along with other peoples’ drawing and photography.

We have lots of questions about trees. Like this one, here I have drawn the Italian Alder Alnus cordata. When I started it, I thought it was a native tree to the area, the Common Alder Alnus glutinosa but I found out that some of the Alders in Cornwall might have been planted as Italian instead of Common by a mistake! The cones of the foreign variety are bigger and the leaf is heart shaped not blunt.

Italian Alder Alnus cordata

Posted in Uncategorized |

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.