Tag: Leu Gardens

Leaf of the Day: Neches River Rose Mallow

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After 10 days of hard work, today I took some time off to meet with a friend at Leu and have a walk and a think about my next drawings and paintings. Just as I was leaving the garden I bumped into Pedro, and Joel who takes care of the Butterfly Garden here. We were talking about the various species of climber that are draped around the garden which are so loved by the butterflies and to my great delight Pedro has now shown me a fence where there are many beautiful scrambling, climbing, clinging things, including… joy of joys…the bat leaved passion flower! Only 4 days ago I was talking about this and I hope to have a leaf later this week to draw. He has also given me a mysterious fruit which I am to put in a paper bag until ripe. I am intrigued.
Today’s drawing is a leaf that I had hoped to use for the course submission. It has been chilling in the fridge for a few days now and is the most elegant and stylish leaf from the from the Neches River Rose-mallow, Hibiscus dasycalyx.
This grows in one of the borders near the Courtyard Gazebo and is a perennial hibiscus found on the Neches River in east Texas. The leaves are beautiful and the flowers are ivory colored with deep pink to maroon throats.


photo from the University of Florida here plus article about hardy Hibiscus

Originally from warm southern China, the hibiscus was developed by the gardeners of the Chinese royal court who bred many varieties in their continual search for new and different flowers, now there are thousands. They were introduced into Europe in the 1700’s and first arrived in the USA in about about 1842. The enterprising nurserymen, the Reasoner Brothers of Oneco, Florida published the first catalogue of 25 species of hibiscus in 1887. Their huge importance in introducing new species to Florida is celebrated in a waymarker sign in Manatee County, more info and map here

The leaves of this plant are gorgeous. Its fine delicate lanceolate fingers are held at the strange angle away from the stem and it was because of this, that I decided not to include it in the page of leaves for the submission. It needs a few drawings to understand its shape and aspect. This is the first hibiscus I have drawn.

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Naches River Rose Mallow

Leaf of the Day: Felt Plant Leaf

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This is the last leaf for the submission (hurrah!) , a small top leaf of one of the strange “felt”plants a variety of Kalanchoe. The largest variety Kalanchoe beherensis can grow to 6 meters. I took a photo of a small one in Sarasota in the Marie Selby Garden a couple of months ago and there is another one at Leu.

The leaf I have painted is from a smaller variety which, as well as the furry leaves, has strange soft bumps on the back of the new leaves. I wanted to try painting something furry.. (pubescent) and this one certainly is. I have not used white body colour in the other leaves, trying to keep to the rule of the purist watercolourist of using white paper for highlights, but to achieve the furryness I used white gouache, mixed with some of the leaf colour and drybrushed the texture over the painted surface.
It was very time consuming, one leaf was fine but I am not sure about a whole plant. However the leaves of the larger kalanchoes are very beautiful and I hope to be able to paint one when I get on to larger subjects.

I am glad to have completed these leaves. There are many areas that are less than satisfactory, it is a steep learning curve to go from loose to very detailed watercolour, and I have to probably do less drawing now and more painting to really improve.
One of the most daunting thing for me is that sheet of pristine white paper. I am very impressed with myself for having managed to keep this sheet fairly splash free.. very good for a messy watercolourist who quite likes blots and runs!
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Felt Plant

Leaf of the Day: 4 Coloured Leaves and Notes

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It’s that day.. that Friday 13th day, when sensible people stay at home and artists don’t pick up a paintbrush before noon.. but I have things to do and have braved bad luck… It is interesting that in Spain it was Tuesday 13th that was considered unlucky and I am still not sure why these dates in particular are so much maligned. Christan belief certainly regards it as unlucky, to do, in the main with the day of the crucifixion and, some say, with that first naughty apple-eating escapade in Garden of Eden which supposedly occurred on Friday 13th. However the Egyptians thought it was a lucky number so today I am with the Egyptians.

It would, however, be convenient if I could just blame all my artistic problems on various inauspicious dates but I know it really has more to do with my skills or lack of them. Since Monday I have been working very hard on the watercolour leaves for the course.
So far I get one done a day. I am trying to be disciplined and make a colour note sketch first, which is, I admit very helpful.. or would be if I could then stick to those colours. I have had problems with all of them..there are 4 more to go.

The two main problems are my lighting set up and, I think, the paper I am working on which is Arches HP.
The lighting is a nightmare. Rooms in these apartments here in Florida tend to be darker, dark is cool! I chose the lightest room to work in and it has a strong side light during daylight hours which can all change in an instant if it is cloudy (often). My model is propped, clipped, taped and balanced on various supports and stuck in wet oasis to get it into the right position to work from, but when the light changes it could be a different plant. The basil was a particular problem. I decided to get an extra lamp with a daylight bulb to get a constant directional light but that conflicts with the light over my drawing board and is a completely different colour from real daylight. The leaf or whatever it is I am drawing completely changes its colour and shadows, so I am still pondering this problem.
As to paper, one of the eternal questions of watercolourists is “which paper??”, they are all so different, and a surface and weight that works for a small subject and fine detail is then difficult to work with on large bold subject. Every artist seems to work on something different. I am a big fan of Arches for loose watercolour, but I am finding this surface somewhat spongy. It may be because I work back into the paper too soon before allowing the paint to dry properly, (impatience is another failing of mine) because I am finding problems keeping sharp edges and have worked over too much in some areas trying to achieve them.

I know I should have practiced working in such fine detail on different papers before wading in to the final assignment piece, but it is the nature of this particular beast to be a deadline worker. I pay for this of course by making mistakes but on the other hand there is a rush of adrenaline which sharpens up the senses and galvanises me into action.

Here are the leaves so far with their colour note sketches. I will be looking at lighting again tomorrow. Some leaves I redrew, as the initial drawings were not quite what I wanted or the leaves had died, (as the basil did!). The ginger leaf was the only one I had, so I needed to work quickly and, bless it, it did manage to stay alive for a couple of day… in the fridge, out of the fridge, in the fridge, out of the fridge…. at the moment there are more plants in there than food.

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4 Coloured Leaves

Leaf of the Day: The Ballistic Bauhinia Pod

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While looking at the Bauhinia trees last week I noticed that the ground around one tree in particular was covered with many pieces of curled seed pod and little disc shaped seeds. I do like seed pods and so I brought a few bits and pieces back. Most of them were in separates halves but this one was complete albeit without its seeds. On returning to the apartment I left them in a bowl water to clean them up a bit and to get rid of a few unwelcome bugs. When I later retrieved them, my lovely curly pods had flattened out completely but, of course, as they gradually dried so they curled up again demonstrating very nicely the “ballistic” method of seed dispersal.

The long flattened seed pods of this bauhinia apparently have layers of woody fibres which are laid at an angle to the edges of the pod. As the pods ripen and dry, the fibres pull against each causing extreme tension until the pod fractures explosively from the tip down, causing the the two halves to corkscrew, firing the seeds off to find their fortune elsewhere.
In this ballistic method of seed dispersal, the bauhinia is something of a champion, the exploding pods able to throw the seeds as much as 50 feet.

Of course for a big tree like this bauhinia it makes sense to get your offspring as far away as possible so as not to compete for space and food.
I have friends who would really like to employ this effective technique to encourage some their long term, stay at home children out into the world!

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Bauhinia Pod

Leaf of the Day: Bauhinia Assorted

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While I was at Leu Gardens the other day I noticed a little grove of bauhinia trees, they really are so pretty. I had drawn one leaf on the 22nd January post, here with some general background information. I loved the elegant shape and they were very new to me then.
Here at the Gardens, there must be six or seven varieties in the group, differing widely in the size and shape of their leaves and in the colour and structure of their flowers.
I have recently come across a charming book by a Mrs D V Cowen “Flowering trees and shrubs of India” published in the 1950’s. It seems that Mrs Cowen was a naturalist and artist and painted not only flowers but birds too, illustrating books by the great Indian ornithologist Salim Ali. I intend to find out more about her, but here is a short extract from her book plus her illustration of the purple and variegated Bauhinias.

“…Edging the golf course of the club was a glorious sweep of glowing purple. Even before I was near enough to identify the trees, the rich, heady perfume which filled the air told me they were Bauhinias. The sight left me breathless and it was then I realised how difficult was the attempt I was making to describe in mere words the trees I know better how to paint…” (“Flowering trees and shrubs of India”)

As ever, I am interested in the leaf shapes.. they are quite different but all with the distinctive bi-lobed leaf construction.
Here are six of the varieties with their flowers.

Bauhinia Divaricata, Elegant leaves with pointed lobes.

Bauhinia bowkeri… A more rounded leaf and first found by a Colonel James Henry Bowker (1822-1900), in the Eastern Cape. The Afrikaans name beesklou (cattle foot) is applied to most of the bauhinias and refers to the resemblance of the leaf the cloven footprints of cows.

Bauhinia grandidieri… A tiny leaved dwarf bauhinia tree.

Bauhinia galpinii … A more rounded leaf shape with very prominent veins and red flowers

Bauhinia travapotensis… A very large leaf with these beautiful spidery white flowers.

Bauhinia yunnanensis … A tiny twining vine from Yunan in southwest China with pink orchid-like flowers veined with purple.

These super photos are from the Florida Flowering Tree Society website

One interesting thing about these leaves is at the base of many is a small arc shaped structure a ‘pulvinus’ ..L. pulvinus: cushion, pillow. Described as “a group of cells at the base of a leaf or petiole that in certain plants by rapidly losing water, brings about changes in the position of the leaves. “
This explains why, when I got the leaves home, some of them had folded in half only to open out again in water. The mimosa (sensitive plant) has the same mechanism for folding its leaves if touched or injured.
I had made some little drawings of the folded leaf in the first post.
The bauhinias also have interesting seed pods.. tomorrows drawing.
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Bauhinia Assorted

Leaf of the Day: …yet another Curly Croton

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You may have gathered from other drawings that I like things that curl and have a bit of a twist to them. I wanted to paint one of these little ornamental corkscrew croton leaves so here is the preliminary drawing. I have already mentioned crotons, the Codeium family and and initially I must admit I found the large flat-leaved ones somewhat ugly but I have made three previous drawings here and, if you love pattern and colour , you have to love crotons. Here are a couple of very nice old black and white catalogue pages from http://www.croton-mania.com/ which show off the variety of patterns. You can see why I am beginning to warm to them.

I will get round to some paintings of them soon as they really need to be seen in all their colourful glory. This one is a modest green with yellow edges and spots.
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Corkscrew Croton

Leaf of the Day: Frangipani Sketches

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My last post from Florida for a while and I am currently sitting in the departures lounge at Orlando airport surrounded by many many children, who all seem to have sprouted black ears and pink princess frocks.
I made these two sketches last week on my last visit to Leu Gardens where they have many Frangipani trees dotted around. I am most attracted to their shape, the limbs of the tree form rhythmic patterns as they grow and the leaves, bright new green, shoot from the very tips of the branches, feathery and delightful. There are some now in bloom and this was my first experience of the heady delights of the Frangipani perfume. The flowers are at their most fragrant at night and the name Frangipani is sometimes attributed to an Italian, Marquis Frangipani who made perfume from them, but although smelling lovely (a bit too sweet to my own taste) they do not have any nectar. The poor Sphinx moth who is programmed to respond to this scent, doggedly goes from flower to flower trying to find the nectar that the delicious aroma promises. Endlessly disappointed he carries on in hope, inadvertently transferring pollen from flower to flower. Quite a little minx this Frangipani!

The first sketch was made as I was walking round. I liked the new shoots so bright against the darker green background of shaded trees. I came back later to expand a little on the first sketch. Its a nice spot to sit, with a handy bench and a whole gang of friendly lizards. I will no doubt return to draw from here again…but for now its goodbye to Florida..my flight is boarding..
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Frangipani Sketches

Leaf of the Day: Bull’s Horn Acacia and its Caretaker Ants

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Today was my last brief trip to Leu Gardens for at least 3 weeks. I will miss my visits, both for the people and the plants. However I have a little thorny twig today from the Bull’s Horn Acacia tree, acacia sphaerocephala which looks nothing much on its own, but just a little research reveals one of those plants with an extraordinary relationship with insects. This time with ants.

While supervising a gold mine in Nicaragua in 1868, Thomas Belt, a British engineer and keen naturalist observed that a particular acacia tree seemed to be colonised with ants, so much so that if he touched the tree and disturbed their colony, the ants would race out and bite him ferociously. Simply put, Belt formed a theory that the plant and the ants seemed to rely on each other, forming a mutualistic relationship, which he published, to some scorn at the time, in 1874. Here is a section from his book “The Naturalist in Nicaragua” which is written in such a delightful way.

“The branches and trunk of the acacia are covered with strong curved spines, set in pairs, from which it receives the name of the bull’s-horn thorn, they having a very strong resemblance to the horns of that quadruped. These thorns are hollow, and are tenanted by ants, that make a small hole for their entrance and exit near one end of the thorn, and also burrow through the partition that separates the two horns; so that the one entrance serves for both. Here they rear their young, and in the wet season every one of the thorns is tenanted; and hundreds of ants are to be seen running about, especially over the young leaves.
If one of these be touched, or a branch shaken, the little ants (Pseudomyrmabicolor, Guer.) swarm out from the hollow thorns, and attack the aggressor with jaws and sting. They sting severely, raising a little white lump that does not disappear in less than twenty-four hours. These ants form a most efficient standing army for the plant, which prevents not only the mammals from browsing on the leaves, but delivers it from the attacks of a much more dangerous enemy–the leaf-cutting ants. For these services the ants are not only securely housed by the plant, but are provided with a bountiful supply of food and to secure their attendance at the right time and place, the food is so arranged and distributed as to effect that object with wonderful perfection.”

The strategically well laid on meals he speaks of are provided in the form of small nectaries at the base of the leaves which produce a sugary, and amino acid rich ant treat. They don’t have far to go, as the thorns and leaves are adjacent. There are also more “solid meals” for them in the form of small protein filled packets at the tips of the leaflets, which he describes as looking like “little pears”. In this photo above from Backyard Nature you can just see ants, cups of nectar and the yellow “pears”
“When the leaf first unfolds, the little pears are not quite ripe, and the ants are continually employed going from one to another, examining them.When an ant finds one sufficiently advanced, it bites the small point of attachment; then, bending down the fruit-like body, it breaks it off and bears it away in triumph to the nest. All the fruit-like bodies do not ripen at once, but successively, so that the ants are kept about the young leaf for some time after it unfolds. Thus the young leaf is always guarded by the ants; and no caterpillar or larger animal could attempt to injure them without being attacked by the little warriors. The fruit-like bodies are about one-twelfth of an inch long, and are about one-third of the size of the ants; so that an ant carrying one away is as heavily laden as a man bearing a large bunch of plantains. ……..These ants seem to lead the happiest of existences. Protected by their stings, they fear no foe. Habitations full of food are provided for them to commence housekeeping with, and cups of nectar and luscious fruits await them every day.”

Belt’s theories were questioned at the time and it wasn’t until the 1960’s that the relationship between the ants and the trees were proved by Daniel Janzen. Astonishingly, as well as being ferocious defenders of the tree, the ants keep the surroundings of the tree clear of other plants, even pruning branches of nearby trees which would overshadow the acacia and take its light.
Thomas Belt was one of those energetic and apparently indefatigable Victorians. A geologist and naturalist by inclination he seemed to be able to juggle both his “hobby” and his job of goldmining supervisor with ease. His work took him to Russia, Australia, Nicaragua, Siberia, Nova Scotia and Denver where he was able to make thorough and important observations of the natural world, as well as theorising about the glacial periods in England. .. It makes my 2 mile radius world of Winter Park seem very small.
For other interesting insect related story see previous posts. oak galls, cycads and fig

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Bull’s Horn Acacia.

Leaf of the Day: May Day, Flora and the Toog Tree

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“March winds and April showers soon give way to sweet May flowers”

The first of May, a day of celebrations redolent of pagan worship, of nature and of new growth. Songs, poems and rituals abound to welcome spring, and the return of growth, of love and of optimism. Flora is about to tread the earth scattering flowers as she goes.

“Now is the month of maying, When merry lads are playing, fa la,
Each with his bonny lass, Upon the greeny grass. Fa la.
The Spring, clad all in gladness, Doth laugh at Winter’s sadness, fa la,
And to the bagpipe’s sound, The nymphs tread out their ground. Fa la.”
Madrigal by Thomas Morley 1595.


Flora ..a detail from Botticelli’s Primavera.

If I were in the UK I would be drawing the hawthorn blossom as superstition allows it to be brought into the house only after the first of May, but not blackthorn blossom. I should definitely be getting up early to wash my face in the dew but should definitely not “cast a clout till May be out.”
I may look down into the waters of a well at noon to see my true love’s face and should I be young and pretty I might be the chosen “Queen of the May”, a symbol of fertility and regeneration but also a reminder that life is fleeting as in Tennyson’s beautiful poem “Queen of the May.” 1833 whose careless heroine is destined to live only till the New Year .
Here are just 3 verses..

“You must wake and call me early, call me early, mother dear;
To-morrow ’ill be the happiest time of all the glad New-year;
Of all the glad New-year, mother, the maddest merriest day,
For I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May.
…….
The honeysuckle round the porch has woven its wavy bowers,
And by the meadow-trenches blow the faint sweet cuckoo-flowers;
And the wild marsh-marigold shines like fire in swamps and hollows gray, And I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May.
……
All the valley, mother, ’ill be fresh and green and still,
And the cowslip and the crowfoot are over all the hill,
And the rivulet in the flowery dale ’ill merrily glance and play,
For I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May. “

“Flora” Evelyn De Morgan 1894.

Compare this very Victorian maid ‘s coy attitude with the steady and knowing gaze of Botticelli’s Flora. One, a pretty ideal of Victorian feminine beauty, the other a reflection of the power of the old goddess and a force of nature to be reckoned with.
It is also interesting that in this painting the tree in the background is a loquat… ( id) a spring fruit.

Today I am celebrating the start of part three of the course which will involve more colour and more leaves, with a little sketch of the Toog tree leaf, bishofia javanica.
I can’t find out why it’s called a Toog tree but the fallen leaves had caught my eye. They are interesting because they seem to fold in half as they dry out and so make beautiful shapes, they also have a bright red interior which makes them stand out amongst the brown leaf mould. The toog is a big handsome tree with a dense canopy valued for its wood and the welcome shade it casts in hot climates. Apparently, according to Florida growers, it is somewhat unruly too as it is known to easily break up pavements and house foundations and cause a litter problem, but surely, better these pretty leaves than empty MacDonald’s cartons.
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Toog Tree Leaf

Leaf of the Day: A Potter Wasp’s Pot

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If you were of a whimsical turn of mind you could be forgiven for imagining that this delicate tiny mud pot, carefully cradled in the apex of the these leaves, was the work of some fairie hand. Having celebrated the work of the gall wasp a couple of days ago, I am now delighted to bring to your attention the clever potter wasp.

Here is a super picture of a potting wasp doing an excellent job ….(I can think of many potters I know who would give their eye teeth to have 4 arms… 2 never seem quite enough somehow).
This of course is to be the nest for the wasp grub. (if you are a caterpillar lover you do not want to know how they are fed)
The image is from a great website about Australian Insects, “Brisbane Spiders and Insects” here . There is step by step guide to the techniques of the potter wasp too but most humans, without the benefit of antennae and 6 legs, will find it tricky .

I seem to be having a bit of a run on lovely natural structures at the moment, but when you take the time to look at the natural world, it is no wonder that designers, architects and engineers turn again and again to nature for inspiration and an elegant solution to a practical problem.

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Potter Wasp Pot