Tag: Leu Gardens

Leaf Of the Day: Coral Honeysuckle.. first contact.

  By

I made my weekly visit to Leu Gardens today as a treat before starting on a final piece for the coloured pencil unit of the course.
The gardens change every week with new things coming into bloom or leaf, it’s a lovely time to be there. One really delightful discovery was the Chinese Perfume Bush which is a nondescript looking shrub but the perfume of its tiny little white flowers is exquisite.

I have been undecided about which plant to draw for this second assignment, and in the end it comes down to something that will hopefully stay alive for more than a day. I also wanted to do something local to Florida. Pansies might have been easier but what is the point of being here and not engaging with the locals, so I collected this piece of Coral Honeysuckle on the way home. It grows all over a neighbouring fence and so if parts of it die I can go and get some more. I think it grows in the UK as well but is rather cold sensitive ..here it is rampant. I have to say I am not very fond of it but closer study may reveal some hidden beauty. It just lacks the delicacy of the native UK honeysuckles and this one has no scent and the colour is garish.

Anyway today I did a quick “get to know it” sketch and am starting to draw it out. I have given myself all day tomorrow to complete it, so I hope I can keep it alive overnight. ( I have put it in the fridge). If I can get the main drawing done and one leaf and one flower in colour then, if I have to bring on substitutes later, I will at least have a guide to the colours.
There is still one other problem in that I have to hang it from my magnifying stand, as it grows trailing down a chain link fence so the stem has to be a the top. I have put a little piece of wet oasis on the cut end which I spray from time to time ..so I hope that will do the trick.. photographs beckon…

_________________________________________

Coral Honeysuckle Sketch

Leaf of the Day: Loquat Fruit

  By

There are two loquat trees, eriobotrya japonica. (‘nispero’ in Spanish) growing locally here and I had not realised that the fruits were edible, because no one around here seems to collect them. But I do remember seeing dishes “with nisperos” on some menus in Spain. They are absolutely delicious.
Loquats and Kumquats are not related but share a similarity in their names because the Cantonese word kwêt, means an orange and both fruit are somewhat like small oranges. Peter Thunberg had seen Loquats in Japan in 1776 ( I wrote a little about this very interesting botanist here in the Sky Flower post) and plants were taken from Canton, China, to the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, England, in 1787.

Here are two beautiful images of loquats to celebrate their Oriental origin.
This one, Loquat and Mountain Bird a Chinese silk painting, Chinese Southern Song Dynasty (1127–1279)


This one a Japanese woodblock print, by Shodo Kawarazaki 1889-1973


Loquats taste something like a cross between an apricot, plum, and pineapple with a delicate flavor. They are used in cooking quite extensively and have a high pectin content so are often made into jams and jellies and preserves.
Prepare a delicious loquat sauce to pour over pan fried pork tenderloin with strawberries, loquats, and Madeira wine. Delicious!

Mine here do not look particularly appetising I know. It is a little bit past the best time for loquats but I wanted to draw these two just as they were, one split open and one whole.
_________________________________________________

Loquat Fruit

Leaf of the Day:Encepalartos Horridus and Yoga

  By

Today I have spent most of the day out and about..this morning I went down to Leu Gardens early as temperatures are beginning to heat up now and by the afternoon we have spectacular thunderstorms preceded by intense humidity. I am wondering how I will survive the summer?
Arriving early is good because you have the Gardens almost to yourself….almost. I don’t know if it’s just me but my steps seem to be dogged at the moment by yoga or tai chi practitioners who commandeer a bit of public space (usually the very best bit ) with a mat which immediately transforms itself into a private 50 ft radius “DO NOT DISTURB ” zone. She was on the jetty by the lake, cool elegant and composed in her simple leotard. I somehow don’t think she had a burger for breakfast or had arrived on a bike, I was disheveled and sweaty from my dicing-with-death bike ride. The bad person in me wanted to toss her over the rails to the alligators.. The good person was considering a cheery “hello” but she was deeply involved in that pose that looks like a dog being sick so I though better of it and moved along to find the friendlier Cycads.

After reading so much about the Cycads I wanted to go and see them again but a drawback of arriving early to the Gardens is that you may have to trail blaze the paths which are criss crossed with webs, I am not good with spiders. The cone I had taken a photo of 2 weeks ago was bigger and better but the path was guarded by a very large web and it was too early in the day for spider trauma. To be fair I haven’t seen that many here. The ones I did see today were tiny little jeweled little things… but, believe me, I don’t look hard.
However I did find the cycad encepalartos horridus so I have a drawing of a truly horrid leaflet today(actually one I had picked up at Marie Selby last week) and I did meet up with my friend Pedro the gardener, who showed me some more strange and wonderful things in the garden which I will hopefully get round to drawing in the next few days. In the butterfly garden many big beautiful butterflies are languidly flapping from flower to flower and there is a small glass fronted box displaying the most exquisite chrysalises ( chrysalides) of the monarch butterfly. They are like little drops of jade with gold specs… My photo below does not quite capture the colours.

Probably the most spectacular butterflies are the Giant Swallowtails that look like humming birds as they hover amongst the flowers.

photo from the North American Butterfly Association



The full leaf of the ferocious Horridus can be 18-24″ They are long stiff recurving leaves that have many intertwined, needle sharp, leaflets. The spines twist away from the plane of the leaf so it can sink its spines into your flesh however you try to approach it. Its native habitat is on exposed slopes provinces of South Africa. .

Here is my photo from Marie Selby Gardens

_________________________________________

Encephalartos Horridus

Leaf of the Day: Dinosaur Food, Visualising Pre History (& some old tricks with perfume)

  By

Cycads
Here, as promised from my previous post Cycad Seeds, is just a little information about these amazing, ancient, Permian era plants that are little changed in 250 million years. Standing amongst the huge primeval creatures on a steamy, close day in Leu Gardens, and understanding some of their history, you could be forgiven for mistaking the air’s damp humidity for the the hot breath of a passing Brontosaurus. They are a glimpse into a strange and wonderful past time.

Quiet, stately plants with leaves shooting straight up from the ground or from long thick trunks, the Cycads are gymnosperms and include zamiaceae, encephalartos, and macrozamia. Some are like palms, some more like ferns and some more shrubby. One I saw at Marie Selby Gardens has long fierce thorns and has the enviable name of encephalartos horridus. These below are the cycus revolta, the confusingly named Sago Palm as it is not a palm but it does produce a type of sago.
photo Dave’s Garden again

A native cycad to Florida is the coontie, Zamia pumila. “Coontie” is a Seminole word which approximates to ‘flour root’ and the Seminole people used it despite its poisonous properties.as a very important food source. The stems and roots had to be pounded to a pulp and washed to remove the poisons and then the paste was dried and used as a flour for baking bread. It was known as Florida “Arrow Root” and there was a sizeable industry in Florida producing the starch until about 1925, but overproduction decimated the local plants as is often the case.
I do wonder how, and at what cost people discovered methods of getting rid of the poisonous parts of plants, or that it would be worth the obvious risk in the end. Captain Cook’s pigs, on his Australian expedition, fell foul of the poison and died. His crew only suffered a ‘hearty fit of vomiting and purging’.

Trading Sex for Pollen
Cycads have a novel way of reproducing themselves which may account for their longevity. I am not going to plumb the murky depths of plant sex to any great degree but this is very interesting
Cycads producemale and female cones on different plants. The male cone produces a scent which attracts thrips, little insects, who enter the gaps in the cone and, in doing so, cover themselves in the pollen they have been seeking. The cone then heats up which changes the attractive scent into something that the thrips don’t like at all.. they flee.. only to find that a nearby female cone is producing the weaker scent they like .. Same scent …different strength. Off they go carrying their precious load of fertilizing pollen with them.
Two scientists Irene Terry and husband Robert Roemer have been studying this behavior at the University of Utah.

“They [cycads] are trading food for sex. Pollen is the only thing these thrips eat, so they totally rely on the plants. And the thrips are the only animals that pollinate the plants.”
“These cycads heat up, and associated with that heating is a huge increase in volatile fragrances emitted by the cone” Terry says. “It takes your breath away. It’s a harsh, overwhelming odor like nothing you ever smelled before”
“Think of a guy with too much after shave” Roemer says.

Apparently this is called push-pull pollination.. a nice conversation stopper for that tedious dinner party, especially if you happen to be sitting next to an overscented lothario whose “volatile fragrance” is clashing with your prawn cocktail.

Painting Prehistory

No article about art and prehistory would be complete without mentioning the great and influential painter /illustrator/sculptor Charles R Knight. In the 1890’s and early 19oo’s he brought the prehistoric world to life for us through his careful and meticulously researched paintings.
His love of nature and quest for accuracy took him at the age of 19 to the American Museum of Natural History in New York .

“Visiting the museum on an almost daily basis, he spent hours in the taxidermy department, studying the carcasses of many creatures, familiarizing himself with their musculature and skeletal structure“

He became well known and worked extensively with the leading paleontologists of the day to produce models and paintings showing what the world must have looked like in those extraordinary times.
The Florida link is also here :
“He frequently visited friends and patrons in Palm Beach, Florida. They were delighted to entertain the renowned artist, and Knight used the Floridian foliage, particularly the palm trees, in his large prehistoric paintings. “
(spot the cycads in the painting above)
Here is the lovely tribute site to Knight maintained by his daughter with acknowledgements to his influence on film makers and other artists.. Willis O’Brien, animator of the classic and tragic King Kong and Ray Harryhausen’s epic monsters owed him much.
DO go and have a look at the wonderful work at Charles Knight Gallery.
Like Normal Rockwell you could say he was a commercial artist but don’t they just brighten your day?

Dino Bugs

Synchronicity is still in the air (blame Jung) as yesterday I heard about the new Xray technique (over a hundred years after Knight) that Paul Tafforeau in France has been using to reveal insects from within ancient pieces of opaque rock. The images are quite magical. Not only does this reveal their presence and detail but the information obtained from the rotating scan can then be used to create an exquisite 3D specimen. DO go and watch the short video from the BBC site here Secret Dino Bugs Revealed .
How very excited Knight would surely have been if he could have seen this.

My drawing today is a sketch of the small Cycad about 4ft ( now I know what it is! ) which grows just across the car park at the apartment. I can see it from the top of our steps. On the north side of the trunk a little colony of Resurrection Fern is growing.. and that’s another curious plant for another post.
_________________________________________

Killarney Bay Cycad

Leaf of the Day: Cycad Seeds

  By

Todays drawing is a coloured pencil version of yesterdays seeds. To just draw 2 seeds doesn’t really do these magnificent ancient plants justice but to tackle a full leaf or cone requires much more time.
I am always fascinated by the design and mechanics of seed pods. The ways that seeds develop and are then dispersed shows natural design at its most ingenious. Anyone who has studied design in any discipline sees structures in nature that are repeated by engineers and architects.
The cycads produce seed cones which have a similar visual design to pine cones and pineapples with arcs and spiral patterns.

Here are cones from Marie Selby Gardens and Leu Gardens.









this photo and more from Dave’s Garden

These patterns are formed by the way the individual scales are arranged. The spirals follow patterns depending on the size of the cones There may be 3 spirals running to the left and 5 spirals moving oppositely, or vice versa. In larger ones, a combination of 5 and 8 spirals, or 8 and 13 spirals and giant cones may have a combination of 13 and 21.

The sharp knives in the box will have realised that these numbers are the Fibonacci sequence…. but that is a whole other post or two. Here it is demonstrated with a strawberry.. same principal.


My two seeds here were both attached to one cone scale by their tips and hang either side of a central “stem”. ..one since came away.

Its shape reminded me of the old fairground ride the Paratrooper and, come to think of it, fairground ride design in general must owe something to the design of seed pods.
The principals are similar although it is preferable that the occupants of these various pods, capsules and containers, whilst being twisted and twirled, are not literally scattered to the winds…

Link for the spiral and other great food/design stuff is at http://www.foodfordesign.blogspot.com/
For more photos and some fairground nostalgia go to the University of Sheffield’s wonderful National Fairground Archive
www.nfa.dept.shef.ac.uk/inldex.htm

I am writing a separate post on the wonderful prehistoric cycads.. they are fascinating both in their antiquity and their bizarre pollination methods which involve some over-heated insects and perfumes good and bad…coming next.
__________________________________________

Cycad Seeds

Leaf of the Day: Easter Calamondin Orange

  By

It’s Easter already and I hear from my father in the UK they are expecting snow. Dan the avuncular weather man here has promised us a fair weekend.
I am going to Sarasota this week to do some watercolour painting and to visit the Marie Selby Gardens there, so may not be posting any drawing here for a few days.

I have some reading matter to take with me…one is William Bartram’s “Travels and Other Writings”. I quote from the fly leaf;
‘Artist, writer, botanist, gardener, naturalist, intrepid wilderness explorer, and self styled philosophical pilgrim’.
Son of the renowned botanist, John Bartram, William travelled extensively in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida from 1773 to 1776 and wrote about all that he saw and heard, presenting a ” moving detailed vision of man living in harmony with nature”.
I shall be pondering this as we make the monotonous 2 hour drive to Sarasota tomorrow on highways lined with identical concrete malls and fast food outlets.. but I am looking forward to seeing the comical pelicans again in Sarasota Bay.

My other book is Jung’s “Memories Dreams and Reflections” My interest is more to do with my research into Africa in the 1920’s for my other blog My Darling Popsy than analytical psychology. He records in this book the journey to Africa during which he crystallised many of his most important ideas on psychology. My grandfather, being on the same ship to Mombassa and then, I have discovered, working in the areas that Jung travelled to, will have seen many of the same things. It will be very intereting and I may learn something about my psyche as well!
I hope to be able to add a couple of “Popsy” posts this week.

This is the tiny Calamondin orange. I added a seasonal egg and a blueberry really to show how tiny they are. They are very tart but if you eat the whole thing the sweetness of rind compensates for the bitterness of the flesh. It’s almost true..but I think that Pedro’s recipe to use the juice mixed with soy sauce as a marinade is probably a better idea.

This will be my last coloured pencil drawing for March…I say with some relief…
_____________________________________________

Calamondin Orange

Leaf of the Day: Tea Leaf and Seed Pod

  By

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?
_________________________________________

Tea leaf and Seed Pod

Leaf of the Day: Carrion Cactus

  By

Never tell people that you are interested in unusual things.. you never know what they will give you!….

I had a blissful day today. Firstly I went to the Orlando Museum of Art to see the Norman Rockwell exhibition and then on to Leu Gardens. The Rockwell was a really interesting show and I am writing a separate post about it.
As I was lingering in the citrus grove at Leu getting my fix of orange blossom scent, Pedro came by on his buggy and decided I should see some of the interesting things in the gardens. He showed me the most delicate little orange tree with tiny oranges, the calamondon, which grows in his native Philippines, the exquisitely scented osmanthus known as the tea or sweet olive, leaves with bright red veins, pretty little annuals with flowers like orchids, the star anise tree with its aniseed scented leaves, the herb arugula and of course because I am British we went to see the tea plants.
I came back with tea seeds, a piece of resurrection fern, some little calamondons, a snippet of a red crown of thorns to hopefully propagate and this lumpy piece of the carrion cactus.

photo from wikipedia

This extraordinary plant the stapelia giantea also known as the starfish cactus produces a big star shaped flower that both looks and smells like rotting meat. The flower’s often red, wrinkled, and hairy surface mimics a small dead animal which, together with its smell of decomposition, attracts flies, who, hoping for a nice meal of putrefying flesh, trample around this wrinkly hairy surface collecting pollen as they go. How does a plant “know ” to mimic a dead animal? Triffids really don’t seem so impossible do they? The one good thing is that the flower doesn’t snap shut on the visiting flies. They are left to go on their way and pollinate others.
I do hope I can get my little piece to grow. Apparently the smell of the flowers is not too bad if they are kept outside!

I had such an interesting time and Pedro is a mine of information about the plants, recipes, mythology, superstitions and philosophy.. he told me that you should not say thank you for the gift of a plant, so I just had to thank him for all his help instead.

Not much time for drawing today so a quick sketch. The structure of the plant is interesting in that the stem has 4 sides which sit at right angles to each other.
_______________________________________________

Carrion Cactus

Leaf of the Day: Oxalis & Firsts and Lasts

  By

The last day of February and it was a beautiful day so I went down to Leu Gardens. If only I could share the physical sense of being there, especially when I walked through the citrus garden. The overwhelming scent of orange blossom took me back to Spain and happy memories of driving through the acres of orange groves along the Guadalhorce Valley in spring. I saw many lovely flowers, trees and birds today, including lots of “firsts” for me in Florida. A comical red crested woodpecker was hammering its head enthusiastically into one of the tall palm trees, a pair of brilliant red cardinals darted in and out of the bushes and two stately woodstorks were fishing in the lake margins and then, most exciting of all, there was my first alligator!..I have to include my photo here.

This was a small one basking in the sun with another larger one farther up the bank. It is wonderful to see them properly in the wild and not in some awful zoo doing tricks for tourists.

However back to the oxalis. There are about 800 different varieties of oxalis and this one is oxalis latifolia, or broad-leaved wood sorrel. This huge leaf was growing amongst some ornamental grasses in wooded shade by the entrance to Leu gardens. Its whole stem from leaf to root tip is 14 inches long, showing how far it had to grow to find the light. It is considered a weed here but is very pretty and they do in fact grow a beautiful dark purple variety in the gardens here.
On this trip I spoke to Pedro, one of the gardeners who drive around in golf buggies, about permission to take samples for drawing and all seems fine, I just have to ask. I am very pleased as my inspiration from the Mall borders is getting somewhat jaded. The only problem I have, is getting there on my bike. I will return to the hair raising subject of cycling in Orlando, city of cars, soon.
________________________________________

Oxalis