Leaf of the Day: Tea Leaf and Seed Pod

A small, new, tea leaf and a seed pod, just splitting open to reveal a fat round seed inside. A drawing for Pedro who took me to see the tea plants at Leu Gardens the other day. I have to admit I didn’t really know what a tea plant looked like, despite years of seeing the PG tips lady picking tea on the box, and I had no idea it was one of the camellia family, camellia sinensis. Shame on me, the amount of tea I drink. This leaf is new and bright green with a reddish stem and smooth edges whereas the older leaves are slightly toothed and much darker green.
This pod has two seed chambers where others have three. I will be making a few more drawings as they are delightful shapes. The young leaves (top 2 and the bud) are harvested, rolled and fermented (oxidised) before they find their way to the teapot as black tea. Green tea is made with unfermented leaves. Amazing! The regular supermarket tea is not very good here. It’s very weak and each bag is individually wrapped with an annoying tag, but at least we have not had it served to us with salt water yet.

This funny little drawing started as I was trying to balance the pod and leaf on the top of a couple of pieces of paper torn out of a sketchbook which were propped up on my drawing board. I thought they looked nice just as they were so that’s how I drew them.
I have just had a memory of tea chests, weren’t they wonderful?
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Tea leaf and Seed Pod

Leaf of the Day: Florida Orange

Here I am in Florida and only today I realised that orange blossom is the State flower. I could be forgiven because it’s not so easy to find an orange tree locally but there are some obvious clues.
We live in Orange County, Orange Avenue is three blocks away and the notorious OBT, Orange Blossom Trail, parts of which are synonymous with extreme low life, runs north-south through Orlando.

Oranges were brought by the Spanish to “La Florida” and became established in the wild, where the early American naturalist, John Bartram, in his journal entry in 1766, writes of them growing growing on the banks of Salt Springs, their wonderful refreshing fruit and delicate perfume.
However the citrus industry really began to take off in the 19th century and by 1880 oranges, lemons, grapefruit and limes were being shipped and sent by rail to New York and Philadelphia.

However, just as earlier this year, Florida is subject to terrible frosts and in 1894 and 1899, the satsuma orange trees were virtually wiped out. The last great freeze was in 1980s when vast acres of citrus groves were destroyed, many owned by Tropicana. The unreliability of the climate has discouraged any major regeneration and who needs oranges when you have Disney?

Here is a saucy American slightly Disney version of Nell Gwynne.

poster images from art.com

Another reminder of the great old orange days is of course the famous train, (and fiddle tune)”The Orange Blossom Special” bringing city dwellers of New York down to the sun kissed shores of Florida. Inaugurated in 1925 I can only imagine how wonderful it must have been to leave the cold city streets of New York to travel in style to the sun.

Well talk about her ramblin’
She’s the fastest train on the line
Well talk about her travellin’
She’s the fastest train on the line
She’s the Orange Blossom Special
Rollin’ down the seaboard line3.

Well, I’m going down to Florida
Get some sand in my shoes
Or maybe California
Get some sand in my shoes
I’ll ride the Orange Blossom Special
And lose those New York blues

I found this great image and further links to Florida history here http://www.spacecoastweb.org/blog/florida/history/

On this day of financial gloom take a second to smile as you watch these kids playing this great blue grass anthem. Check out little Katie giving it her all, “Go Katie”

or a classic bit of Johnny Cash

A footnote on American trains.. don’t you just love them? We live near the railway track and hear and feel the long slow Amtrack train as rumbles and hoots its way along the Winter Park loop. We can hear the constant rise and fall of its plaintive whistle for a good half hour warning people away from the largely unprotected track. To us Brits brought up on old American movies of pioneering rail travel, the particular clanging sound of the crossing gates and the mournful whistle evoke ideas of freedom, of wide open spaces, of hobos flipping the freight cars and great railroad songs with those lonesom’ harmonica solos.
We love the train. Our neighbours think we are strange.

In this drawing I have tried some burnishing where the colour is smoothed down. It’s an interesting technique and blends the colours more but makes the surface very slippery and difficult to work over. The drawing could be more finished but at the moment I don’t want to spend more than one day on a drawing unless its something special. I still consider all this experimental. I persevere.
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Orange Blossom

Leaf of the Day: Spotty Dumb Cane

This pretty spotty leaf is a very small one from a much bigger plant, which I am sure is a diffenbachia, growing in a shady side road here.
The diffenbachia is a well known houseplant in the UK and another to be treated with some respect. It’s called the “dumb cane” with good reason as the plant contains tiny, needle sharp, calcium oxalate crystals. These puncture the cells and release a protein called asparagine, which causes severe inflammation of soft tissues. Chewing on the leaves makes the tongue swell and can restrict both speech and breathing. A guide I read here advises that you should “dissuade your rabbits, canaries, dogs and cats from snacking on the leaves.”

Its medical uses are, as you can imagine, interesting.
The German pharmacologist G Madeus in 1938 writing about some if its unusual applications had found that Amazon Indians used it, not only as an ingredient for poison arrows, but also to sterilize their enemies. In parts of the Caribbean it used to be thought that chewing a leaf was an effective temporary contraceptive. I can only assume that your lover would be struck dumb as well…. “whispering sweet nothings” would become more truth than romantic foreplay, some ladies possibly finding it an added attraction to be spared the verbal encouragement.

In light of this alarming information I think that, in addition to the treasured pets, you need to dissuade your man from snacking on this plant lest he be rendered both speechless and useless. (There must be a joke in there somewhere..)

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Dumb Cane

Leaf of the Day: Kmart Pansy

Today my first coloured flower. A pretty pansy from Kmart after the exotic, if a bit gruesome, carrion cactus.
How can you not be completely charmed by these delicate and exquisitely coloured flowers. Their serious little nodding faces giving them their name and meaning, from the French “pensee“, thought. We take them for granted in some ways because they are common and fairly hardy. There are a few struggling for survival in a nearby apartment block garden and I really want to rush out one night with a trowel and gather them all up for some TLC.

Modern pansies are related to the little blue violas which had been cultivated in Greece since the 4th Century B.C, mainly for medicinal purposes. The pansy, as we know it, was developed by Admiral Lord Gambier and his gardener William Thompson on the Gambier estate at Iver, Buckinghamshire in the 1800s. They crossed various violas gradually encouraging more pleasing patterns and larger blooms. The familiar blotch that gives the pansy much of its character was chance seedling which was developed into the variety Medora in 1839.
A darling of the Victorians, the pansy was celebrated in poetry, literature and the “Language of Flowers”. Giving a bunch of flowers would became a minefield of innuendo and be heavy with significance. I am sure that many a budding romance must have been stopped dead in its tracks by the inclusion of an inappropriate flower.

Of course flowers were metaphors for the human condition well before the Victorian era. The significance of Shakespeare’s references to flowers would have been easily understood by his audience.
Here is the wild pansy in Ophelia’s famous “garland” speech from Hamlet:

“There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance.
Pray you, love, remember.
And there is pansies, that’s for thoughts,
There’s fennel for you, and columbines.
There’s rue for you, and here’s some for me;
we may call it herb of grace o’ Sundays.
O, you must wear your rue with a difference.
There’s a daisy.
I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died;
they say he made a good end.”

In “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” Oberon drops a potion of wild pansy onto the eyelids of the sleeping Titania, he asks Puck to assist.

“Yet mark’d I where the bolt of Cupid fell:
It fell upon a little western flower,
Before milk-white, now purple with love’s wound,
And maidens call it love-in-idleness.
Fetch me that flower; the herb I shew’d thee once:
The juice of it on sleeping eye-lids laid
Will make or man or woman madly dote
Upon the next live creature that it sees.”

Everyone should have some of these sweet flowers, and love and cherish them.
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Pansy

Leaf of the Day: Persimmon 482 and Lotus Eating

Today I walked down to our other local supermarket Publix. It is probably the Tesco of Orlando whereas Albertsons is more the equivalent of Sainsburys. They both have excellent fruit and veg counters. I am short of time today and I saw this little persimmon or sharon fruit which I thought would be both nice to draw and good practice with yellows and oranges.

The American name ‘persimmon’ is adapted from the native Indian word pesimin, early settlers would learn from the Indians to leave it on the tree to ripen until well into October or it is a bitter fruit. Recipes for cooking with persimmons and making wine are many and various as are the varieties of this fruit.
The “Diaspyros lotus” , the date plum, translates loosely as “fruit of the gods”, and is one of the contenders for the wonderfully dangerous lotus fruit mentioned in the Odyssey. Eating the fruit erased the memory. The desire to return home was replaced by the desire to stay in idleness and pleasure with the “lotus eaters”. Odysseus had a problem persuading his men back on the boat..who could blame them.

A passage from Tennyson’s strangely alluring poem “the Lotos Eaters” explains their feelings.

“Round and round the spicy downs the yellow lotos-dust is blown.
We have had enough of action, and of motion we,
Roll’d to starboard, roll’d to larboard, when the surge was seething free,
Where the wallowing monster spouted his foam-fountains in the sea.
Let us swear an oath, and keep it with an equal mind,
In the hollow Lotos-land to live and lie reclined
On the hills like Gods together, careless of mankind. “

Perhaps my occasional expat longings for home might be cured with a plate of these delicious fruit.

I spent most of the day considering my watercolours, reading up about which are transparent and making yet more colour charts. My approach to watercolours has in the past been a bit haphazard and as it is really important to keep colours clean and fresh for botanical painting its time to be more disciplined. For anything you need to know about watercolour visit http://www.handprint.com/ It’s a fantastic site, full of technical information about every aspect of watercolour. I am going to put a links box for good art sites on soon.
Meanwhile the coloured pencil work continues.
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Persimmon

Leaf of the Day : A Terbinate Fruit

I do like the strange and odd in life and this is a very strange fruit indeed. Although it looks like some bizarre composite it is real, and not just a bad drawing, I promise. I found a few of these fallen “fruit” in Leu gardens and luckily they had fallen next to their name tag. This is the fruit (and a tiny leaf) of Pereskia Grandifolia the Rose cactus. Some of the fruits which had fallen on the floor were linked together like the one I have drawn, originally this one was a chain of three.

I have yet to see the flowers in real life, but they look very pretty from the photos on the Internet. I don’t quite understand how the fruit develop in these chains and on the tree at Leu Gardens the leaves grow in an odd way too, straight out of the trunk which in turn has huge ferocious spines.
I have read that the fruits are described as “terbinate with leaflike bracts. Turbinate meaning “like a spinning top or an inverted cone” Originally from Brazil, where it is colloquially called “pray for us”, it is a cactus but with edible broad leaves that look just like regular leaves.

It’s related to other edible cacti including prickly pears and the amazingly beautiful Dragon fruit which I do hope to find here to draw.I first came across this in Nicaragua served for breakfast in Hostel Oasis in Granada. I had never seen a fruit of such a beautiful colour and only now know what it was.






Dragon fruit

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Pereskia , Rose cactus

Leaf of the Day: Turkey Tail Fungus

This is the most delicate little fungus, trametes versicolor. It’s so light and thin just like paper and beautifully layered. They seem to come in many different colours and are common here and in the UK too. Mine was not particularly spectacular but pretty and quite a challenge to draw in the dreaded coloured pencils, but I persevere. This came from the lovely woods at Bulow Plantation where we went just over a week ago. I also found a piece of bark with the most beautiful green lichen which I will tackle another day, its terribly complicated and I dont feel quite up to it yet.

No explanation necessary for the name of course. Here in the USA it is definitely safer to be a wild turkey fungus than just a regular wild turkey that’s for sure.
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Turkey Tail Fungus

Leaf of the Day: Variegated Ginger

This weekend summer arrived as the clocks went forward and the temperatures slipped backwards. The weather at the moment yo-yos from stuffy, hot and humid to very cold. We had some torrential rain on Friday and now I see that all the deciduous trees are beginning to get new and bright green leaves, catkins and new flowers.. I will not be able to keep up with them.
I made myself go back to the coloured pencils today and so here is the top 12 inches of a very large variegated ginger leaf. I liked the patterning so concentrated on that. They are another municipal plant seen in the Mall borders and office block gardens. This is the Alpinia zerumbet a member of the edible ginger family the catchily named Zingiberaceae. It can grow to a tall and exuberant 6ft as do many things here in Florida. If only I too could add a couple of inches here in this luxuriant climate. (upwards, hard ..outwards, all too easy)

I still am not happy with how the pencils feel. I sharpened them religiously but still miss having the point of a nice springy brush to draw fine lines with.. these feel terribly clumsy in comparison. It also seemed to take an age to just get some basic colour down. However I will persevere. Left to my own devices I would use then quite differently but the constraints of the course require accuracy rather than flamboyant approximation.
There are some artists who do produce exquisite work in coloured pencils..so it’s not the medium it’s just me.
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Variegated Ginger

Leaf of the Day: Red Leaf

Today I cycled to Kraft Gardens for a couple of hours in order to find a leaf to start the coloured pencil work with. I actually have a veritable nature table here, full of leaves. It’s a perfect example of my normal displacement behaviour which I wrote about here. Finding something thoroughly absorbing and apparently vital to do rather than start the difficult task ahead must be well known to many.
Kraft gardens was delightful and I did find this leaf. I made some sketches, which I will post tomorrow, and managed to fritter away a bit more time, putting off the evil hour of the coloured pencil work. I have been avoiding starting this project for days as coloured pencil is new to me apart from colouring in roughs or adding a bit of pzazz to a watercolour. I did have a few fruitless hours playing with them, in an aimless way, and making a colour chart (more excellent displacement behaviour). The most daunting task was sharpening them all and then, when I did finally sit down to do this drawing, I seemed to be working with an ever increasing fistful of them, dropping them on the floor and generally getting in a temper with them. Some are waxier than others and some grittier leaving little black specks on the paper here and there.

It has been very frustrating but it is mainly, of course, because I don’t yet understand how to use them well, which paper to use and if the ones I have bought are the right ones for this fine work etc etc. I just have to experiment. This first attempt is on a very smooth cartridge with the Prismacolor set.
There are some things I quite like about them but I am used to paint which I can apply thinly to achieve pale tones. Here you have to use pale coloured pencils and you really have to think hard about which colours you are going to use. It is, I suppose, a very good discipline for me.
I am reluctant to post this today but I did say it would be the good and the bad. I do like some of the colours and I always say to my students if only half an inch of a painting is successful then it hasn’t been a waste of time. I am now going to have a large gin and tonic…
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Red Leaf