Tag: daily drawing

Leaf of the Day:Champaka pod and about Drawing.

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On my second visit to Leu this week I was still trying to find inspiration for the next assignment, the botanical study, but keeping me on the straight and narrow when I get to the gardens is just hopeless. I looked at many things, walked for miles and looked again at the soapberry and the tea camellia and am considering the crown flower again, but there are no flowers on the tea at the moment and the soapberry flowers are the tiniest things you can imagine.

So I came to no conclusion but did find these odd little immature Champaca pods. Long ago Pedro gave me an old gnarled spent seed case from this beautiful tree, since when I have been patiently waiting for a new one… for over a year. I think I now know why I can’t find a mature one ..it’s squirrels.. It has to be the squirrels again, they eat all the pods of the other magnolias too. I can never find one with all those lovely red seeds.

I wrote about the glorious scented Champacas last year here and the beautiful big Michaelia alba near the avenue of Camphor trees has just started blooming. The scent is sheer heaven ! I brought one of the little flowers back with me and its perfume has filled the room.
The pods are actually from the Michaelia champaca, the original “Joy Perfume” tree and develop from the cone shaped central receptacle of the flower. This photograph is from the excellent Wayne’s Word site here and shows the flower and the mature seed pod.

If only I could find one. I think I may ask Pedro to put a bag over one for me while it matures. I am sure I read this advice somewhere, given to someone also trying to find an intact un-squirreled magnolia pod.

These are curious things, green with white spots at the moment. The mature ones will blacken and then split. I cut one large pod open and inside were 6 seeds snugly wedged up against each other, completely filling the cavity, again, beautifully designed. As I took them apart, there were the fine white strings that attach the seeds to the case, just like the magnolia.

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Champaca Pods

Leaf of the Day: A Beautiful Abutilon

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How very pretty and dainty is the lovely old fashioned “Parlour Maple”, the Flowering Maple, the Abutilon striatum. At Leu Gardens there is one little unnamed tree growing in the shade by the path to the lake. The little bell shaped flowers hang like folded butterfly wings, they catch the morning sun and glow a brilliant orange, their deep red veins like the leading of tiny glass lampshades…so it’s not surprising it is sometimes called a Japanese Lantern flower .
For over a year I have been meaning to do some drawings, always prompted by seeing them on one of the first paths I take, lit by an early morning sun, but then always getting sidetracked. However today I had a tiny sketch book and watercolours and jotted it down. It’s interesting how much better this is for me than a photograph .. more of that later.

This delicate little tree which is native to Brazil is not related to the Maple at all but belongs to the Mallow family along with cotton, hibiscus and the rose of Sharon etc. The misnomer of Maple arises from the similarity of the leaf shape,
Abutilon striatum arrived in Europe and North America early in the 19th Century where it soon became a darling of the parlour, companion I am sure to the redoubtable aspidistra. I remember trying to grow one in England many years ago. I remember especially because it had mottled leaves, the result, it seems, of the Abutilon Mosaic Virus. This virus was introduced into London from the West Indies in 1898 by the garden suppliers Veitch and Sons. They had discovered a seedling with mottled yellowed leaves and quickly bred an ornamental variety which soon became a fashionable must-have plant for the dresser.


Flowers are popular subjects for stamps. This stamp is from Albania from the web site “Herbier Philatélique” by Pierre Guertin, a Philatelic Herbarium here.. very neat.

It seems such a shame that this pretty little tree has fallen out of favour. The flowers are a perfect shape, and quite exquisite with thick ribbed red veins on the orangy yellow petals and the little tassel of stamens. I should make a finer watercolour study one day.

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Abutilon striatum, The Parlour Maple

Leaf of the Day: Squirrels and Tabebuia Pods

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Here the relentlessness of growth never stops. When one thing is dormant another is bursting into life. Not to have those regular quiet, dormant times of northern regions sometimes seems exhausting. So, despite it being early in the year and to both my delight and frustration, there are lots of seed pods around. I can’t possibly keep up with them all. In a confusion of life cycles there are trees with flowers but no leaves, trees with new leaves but without flowers and then trees with flowers, leaves and fruit all at the same time.

The golden trumpet tree Handroanthus chrysotricha whose beautiful flowers were with us for only a few days, is one which gets to shows off its flowers before the distraction of leaves. The overwhelming yellow of this tree set against a clear blue Florida sky is breathtaking.

The flowers are gone now but just over a week ago when I went to the Gardens I stood under one of the many “Tabebuia’s” as they are known here, admiring these very nice furry pods which seem to have appeared from nowhere, instantaneously and in profusion.. amazing.

However I also realised I was being was showered with seeds and bits of debris because above my head 3 squirrels were busy methodically stripping the tree of its fruit. I watched as they grabbed the pods and then daintily nibbled all the flesh from the pod leaving ribbons of the outer skin and discarding the seeds. They were voracious and determined. Yesterday I went back and only ribbons of the stripped pods remain but the ground is carpeted with the silvery seeds.

I did save one pod because the little, flat, winged seeds are so attractive, but today I only have time for a quick pod sketch and a study of 3 seeds which are looking a bit like strange owls.
For the next submission we are required to make a proper botanical study and I am supposed to be using a magnifying glass for a bit of dissection and being more methodical about recording accurately what size things are drawn. The seeds are drawn at 3 x their original size so are a massive 2.75″ long, but I neglected to write that on the drawing..Hmm well it has been a long week.
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Golden Trumpet Seed Pod and Seeds

Happy Easter and Blog Break.

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I have been so busy that Easter has just come out of nowhere. With the exhibition up and running, posting here will be sporadic for a while. No, I am not lounging around in the sun unfortunately, but doing some illustration work. A book I illustrated some 20 years ago is to be republished in a smaller format and needs some illustrations to be re done; a curious job, to be copying my own work! There will not be a leaf in sight so the work doesn’t really fit in this blog but if the author permits I will publish progress. I will hopefully be continuing leafy, pod-type posting twice a week here, with more Leu finds or other images and stories

Also with a year of sketches and drawings piling up it is time to make room for more so I will be offering some work for sale. Therefore, my faithful blog readers, if you find you can’t live without a strangely beautiful little pencil drawing of a seed pod or two let me know….special rates apply for faithful readers! I am about to get more organised but at the moment my selling strategies are haphazard.. i.e. if you have seen something on the blog you have liked let me know and if it I still have it and it is in a saleable form I can let you know price size etc.

Meanwhile Happy Easter to you all and many many thanks for all your kind comments and good wishes for the exhibition, which so far is going very well!

I am having a couple of days off!
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Spring Tree and Bird

Exhibition Images

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Today I managed to get to the Gardens for a lovely relaxing walk in the sun and to take some photos of the exhibition in situ. There have already been so many really enthusiastic comments and the staff are saying they have never had an exhibition quite like this, (which can be taken in two ways I know, but I am thinking positive today!). The most encouraging aspect is that people are really stopping to read the blog posts which are printed out underneath each picture and that is the difference between a normal art exhibition and this blog exhibition. What they will make of some of the stories I just don’t know.
I met most of the gardeners today who were delighted to have been immortalised in print. Well without them none of this would have been possible and I have managed to mention Pedro, Susan, Joel, Tony and Eric, who in particular have helped me so much. They, and the plants, are really the stars of the show.

My snaps are not brilliant but do give an idea of how we laid it out with the images and their corresponding texts underneath, as here with some of the pod drawings.

I cut down the blog posts considerably which perhaps was not as necessary as I had thought but didn’t want to give people text overload.
The space is not very well lit and the first five photos are taken in a narrow entrance hall.

The first three groups are the Leu House drawing and intro, my favourite Soapberry, and the Yaupon Holly. (the text about the black tea drink is, I now realise, appropriately opposite the restrooms..:)

The hall then opens out into a larger space which gives the bigger pictures some breathing space too.

In addition I wanted to show some of the pods etc. so there is a small display in a glass case containing my models.

This whole area is not a dedicated exhibition space and is used for many different functions, so an “opening” was not possible and prices cannot be shown on the work. Instead there is a price list with the main desk and I have links to one with text only, and one with images, at the top of the blog too. I am delighted with how it looks and for the great help given to me by Paul Wenzel who really did all the hard work of measuring and hanging. It was a long job with 49 pictures and 43 text plates to hang. A big thank you also to director Robert Bowden for granting me the opportunity to show my work at the lovely Leu Gardens.
*****PDF price list with images is available HERE.

I will be updating exhibition progress from time to time.

Leaf of the Day: Vegetable Plot Sketches

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I love vegetable gardens, probably more than flower gardens. I like the neat rows of things which start off well ordered and then become disordered and unruly…just like life really. I like the different shapes of the leaves of new seedlings and the various stages of growth. I like big terracotta forcing pots and big leafy veg, tendrils twining up supports, white labels and twiggy pea sticks. I like espaliers and cloches, earthed up potatoes, asparagus ridges, feathery carrot tops and sprawling cucumbers and all the paraphernalia which goes along with the effort to produce something edible. Sometimes, I know, the rewards are small but the doing of it has been a joy.

The little vegetable garden at Leu Gardens changes frequently with the seasons. Sometimes it is neat and all new and sometimes overblown and gone to seed. There have been some wonderful new-to-me things such as the beautiful red okra which I have yet to get around to drawing and the odd Jicama, Indian Corn, Black Eyed Peas and of course some old favourites.
There is a small “tool shed” with a rather nice grasshopper wind vane, a veranda and a rocking chair, where you can sit and watch things grow. I made a couple of sketches the other day.


There is not too much there at the moment so I did have to add a few extra leaves here and there to the watercolour sketch, but the row of onions half in and half out of the sun caught my eye.

Tomorrow a cauliflower…
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Veg Garden Sketch

Leaf of the Day: Pink Lemon Blossom…and the Odd Story of Pink Lemonade

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The Pink Lemon Citrus limon, Eureka Variegated, is really pretty right now. The blossom is so fragrant and the buds are a beautiful pink too. The Eureka varieties originated in California, developed from a group of seedlings of Italian origin, from seed said to have been planted in 1858.
Apart from bearing delicious lemons this is a very pretty tree with variegated green and white leaves. Like the stripy orangequat I drew here, the rind of the young lemons is striped green and cream . When fully ripe, the stripes fade, and the rind turns yellow with distinct pink tinges.


Pink Lemon, Leu Gardens August 2008

The flesh of these delightfully stripy lemons is a pinky colour but is not however the pink of pink lemonade.. Chow hound here explains how the drink may have got its name..
“The pink drink first appeared in the United States around the mid-1800s, though its origins and inventor are sometimes disputed. In one story, red cinnamon hearts accidentally were added to a batch of lemonade at a carnival concession. But according to carnival historian Joe Nickell, in his 2005 book Secrets of the Sideshows, a man named Pete Conklin who ran a circus lemonade and peanut concession actually was the one who invented the drink. One day in 1857, while Conklin was making regular lemonade, he ran out of water. In desperation, he used the pink water from a tub that one of the bareback riders had used to wash her red tights. Unfazed, Conklin added some lemon slices and sold the concoction as “strawberry lemonade,” promptly doubling his sales. And, as they say, when life gives you lemons …. “

I brought this little sprig home to draw with just one blossom opened, nestled in between the pink buds…it’s very pretty and smells beautiful too.
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Pink Lemon Blossom

Watercolour on Arches Not 5″ x 7″

Leaf of the Day: Gorgeous Gardenia Pod

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I was going to concentrate on some landscape sketches this week but then last week I found this gorgeous little seed pod and just had to draw it. Sadly, I had missed the flowers on this little, low growing Gardenia, Gardenia jasminoides.

Carl Linnaeus named the genus after the very interesting Dr. Alexander Garden (1730-1791), the Scottish-born American naturalist, who was a doctor in South Carolina. His greatest enthusiasm however was studying natural history, but finding no like minded neighbours; “there is not a living soul who knows the least iota of Natural History,” he parcelled up his findings of plant and animal species and sent them to John Ellis, a zoologist in London, and to Linnaeus in Sweden. For his general services to botany and medicine he was honoured by the naming of the gardenia.

Gardenia is native to the tropical and subtropical regions of Africa, southern Asia, Australasia and Oceania, and was originally known as the Cape Jasmine. John Ellis describes the shrub in a letter to Phillip Carteret in 1760.
“The Cape Jasmine is the most rare and beautiful shrub that has been introduced into the European gardens, as well for the refreshing smell of its double milk-white flowers as the perpetual verdure of its leaves, which are like those of the lemon tree. We are indebted to Capt. Hutchinson of the Godolphin Indiaman for this curious discovery, who about six years ago found it growing near the Cape of Good Hope”


Text and image from the Royal Society Publishing “Philosophical Transactions” here


Ehret’s Gardenia , from “Plantae et Papilliones Rariores” (London, 1748-1759) from Donald Heald here.

The beautiful Gardenia was already well known in Asia, where it was revered for over 2000 years for its heavy scent and medicinal properties. In Japan it is called kuchinashi where a reddish yellow dye was made from the chopped and boiled seeds which contain crocin, the same colouring that is derived from the saffron crocus. Boiled in water, the end product required no mordant, and textiles, when dyed with a combination of safflower and kuchinashi, became a beautiful deep yellow colour, the designated colour for the robes of a crown prince.
Although superseded now, it was also used as a printmaking colour and Roger Keyes writing about Japanese colourants notes that “ the dyeing of cloth was a fine art when the first prints were made and, hence, the colorants used in treating cloth were likely to have been employed initially in printmaking…”


Bolts of drying cloth from One Hundred Views of Edo by Ando Hiroshige
from Japanese prints of London here

If you like the scent you can make your own Gardenia tea by adding a flower to a tin of loose tea leaves and sealing it for a few days, similarly with rice or oats to make flavoured desserts. Traditional Chinese medicine uses the gardenia to treat many aliments, including to “drain fire” and treat fevers. The kernel of the gardenia berry is used for herbal poultices to treat sprains, pulled muscles, or inflammation and there was some recent evidence that it may help in controlling diabetes.

I am sure the health food shop across the road will have many remedies containing gardenia in some form, but my fondest memory is of the “Gardenia” perfume which you could buy in small cheap bottles from the now defunct Woolworths. The contents I am sure never saw a gardenia in any way shape or form and but the sickly smelling perfume along with a bunch or two of flowers was of course enthusiastically and gracefully accepted by my mother on Mother’s day. Gardenia is now one of the Elizabeth Taylor perfumes, “Launched in 2003, it has fragrance notes of gardenia, jasmine, lily of the valley, orchid, rose, white peony, carnation, and musk “, and I am sure is far superior to the Woolies version.
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Gardenia Pod and Leaves

Leaf of the Day: The Loquats are Ripe

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I know I have been here over a year now because everywhere the Loquat trees are full of delicious and ripening fruit. This was my first free food discovery here in America and, having tasted them, I could not believe that so many local trees were left un harvested. There are many ways of serving these little fruits, I like the idea of preserves eaten on hot buttered toast, but they are delicious eaten, just picked, from the tree. There are at 2 trees at Leu Gardens which are bearing fruit and another one the Bronze Loquat, Eriobotrya deflexa which is only a small immature tree but is already very handsome with beautiful big serrated leaves. This variety will only have small fruit but the leaves are magnificent.

The Loquat I have drawn is Eriobotrya japonica also known as the Japanese medlar, or in Spain as the Nispero. The name is derived from “erion” which is Greek for wool and “botrus” for grape, which quite neatly describes the fuzziness of the stems, leaves and sometimes the fruit too. I wrote about it last year here so I won’t repeat myself, only to say that if you haven’t tried them you really must!

I picked a few fruit a couple of days ago but when I went back many had been eaten or picked, here is one of the culprits.

Loquats are very delicate and pulling them off the stem bruises the fruit. You have to eat them, (or draw them) quickly, as they don’t last. The one I cut open was beautifully juicy but browned quickly as I was drawing it. The thin skin of the fruit is yellow or orange, sometimes tinged with red and there are the remains of some flowers on the slightly fuzzy stem. Inside are up to 5 large brown seeds that have a golden sheen to them.

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The Loquat or Nispero

Leaf of the Day: The Sweetly Scented Garden

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“Sweet” is such a pretty word, applied to so many pleasing things, from flavours and scents to the very nature of things and even sometimes to us humans. Just now, as you walk though Leu Gardens, sweet scents follow you everywhere you go. Around every corner there is another subtle fragrance, different but so delightful, and the citrus garden is heavenly with the Valencia Orange and the Pink Lemon in full bloom. But sometimes the source of the scent is hard to track down. Hiding away, tucked in between leaves or carried high above your head are many pretty and sweet smelling little flowers, often with “sweet” in their name. My sketch today is of the Sweet Osmanthus but there are also:

The Sweet Almond Bush, Aloysia virgata,

the Sweet Viburnum, viburnum odoratissimum,

the Sweet Acacia, Acacia farnesiana,

and, cut back this year but still with enough perfume to scent the lakeside path is the Chinese Glory Bower Clerodendrum chinense.

Perhaps most surprising of all, is the exquisite scent of the Chinese Perfume Plant, Chinese Rice Flower, Mock Lemon, Aglaia odorata. It is really hard to believe that this tiny flower and quite nondescript little shrub can produce such strong scent. You would probably walk past it, looking for something much showier that would merit this heady perfume. It carries on blooming all year round and if I were to have just one scented shrub in my imaginary garden it would be this one. It’s evergreen too and would make a divine perfumed hedge.

But today I have sketched the Sweet Osmanthus, Osmanthus fragrans also known as Sweet Olive, Tea Olive or Fragrant Olive.
I grew the wonderful Winter Sweet Chimonanthus fragrans, in a sheltered spot in my little garden in England. I loved it most for the strange small flowers that appeared early in the year on bare stems. The little Osmanthus here reminds me of it, with its groups of tiny pretty scented flowers sometimes growing from the main stems.

The Sweet Osmanthus was introduced into Europe from China in the middle of 19th century by a French botanist Jean Marie Delavay. The word Osmanthus being derived from the Greek osma, meaning “fragrant”, and anthos, meaning “flower”.

It is so pretty and dainty and is native to China where it is the ‘city flower’ of Hangzhou.
This is from Top Tropicals here

Chinese monks planted these trees around Buddhist temples in the Manjuelong Valley which lies in the mountainous area. As time went on, the blossoming Osmanthus trees in the valley became an autumnal allure to Hangzhou residents. The valley is flanked by hills where springs are abundant and trees flourish naturally. The geographic advantages and monk’s heritage has made the valley a paradise of osmanthus trees. Now all households in the valley without exception have their own osmanthus groves. When dew is heavy at dawn, flowers will fall floating like a rain in a breeze.

Valued for its delicate aroma, some say like peaches or apricots, it is used as an additive to flavour teas and desserts. The flowers of Osmanthus range from white to orange to reddish, the very expensive perfume extract, Osmanthus absolute, is usually prepared from the gold-orange flowers.



Chinese stamps from an article by John C. Leffingwell. Ph.D about the perfume of osmanthus on the Leffingwell site

I have been thinking of all the other lovely sweet flowers in the UK too, meadow sweet, sweet violet, and the incomparable sweet pea. My father worked for a seed company in Lincolnshire and in the summer we would go to the trial grounds and pick armfuls of sweet peas that were growing in tall colour coded rows. I remember the colours shifting from yellows to creams to pinks to reds to dark crimsons and lilacs. They scented the house for days and days.

So here is a small watercolour sketch of a twiggy stem of the sweet little Sweet Osmanthus. The flowers survived in the fridge a couple of days, just long enough. I think this could be another to develop for the white flower series.
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Sweet Osmanthus