Leaf of the Day: View from the Provision Tree

I have spent all day framing, re framing, mount cutting, finger cutting, stringing, assembling, re touching, varnishing, labelling, price listing and all the other last minute panicky things that go along with an exhibition. I also wanted one more sketch as I realised I had nothing at all of the lovely old Leu House.

This sketch is the view of the House from the Provision Tree. This wonderful tree is tucked away at the side of the lawn which sweeps down from the old Leu House towards the lake. Ever since I found it, months ago now, I go back to see if it is doing anything. It isn’t. It does have nice plain leaves but I know it will, at some time, have wonderful flowers followed by equally wonderful fruit .. but I will have to wait ..it’s frustrating.

The view up to the Old House is framed by oaks and one tall palm. These lower lawns are a lovely tranquil place where few people venture. I look back up at the house and wonder about the families who lived there, those who enjoyed the beautiful views to the lake, watched the squirrels and the lizards; heard the woodpeckers, the red cardinals, the jays and the mockingbirds; saw the sun go down from the balcony accompanied by the rustling of leaves and the swaying of wind blown Spanish moss.

Tomorrow is exhibition hanging day.. I hope to have some photos.
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View of Leu House from the Provision Tree

Leaf of the day: Two Big Leaf Paintings ..almost done

I have to stop work on the two big leaf paintings now. I would like to carry on and can never say when things are really finished. Sometimes you just stop, or run out of steam or ideas or time. I have definitely run out of time.

But one of my blog readers asked me the other day why/how these paintings came about and I realised that in the past posts I had not really said anything about the ideas behind them.
It is probably obvious that I very much admire leaves, the unsung heroes of the plant world, and wanted to make a couple of bigger images of leaves for the show and also to have a break from small watercolours and close work.

When I was sketching out the ideas, Mark Catesby’s work was fresh in my mind and in some ways these are a small tribute to him. His simple way of combining elements without too much regard for scale or perspective appealed to me. Also he painted what he found interesting, what he liked and what he had seen together on a particular day or in a particular location. That simple and honest way of working was my jumping off point.

The Aralia leaf image occurred more by accident than design as I had randomly put the leaf on the sheet of paper at that I had sketched on and I had been looking at lizards that day, so the the two seemed to work together. I like paintings that include other paintings or drawings. It’s an interesting angle on reality.

The dried Snakewood Tree leaves are just magnificent on their own and in some ways I could have left it solo, but I do like a narrative and so this picture now links a few things that I felt worked together and have a reason for being together. The first snake I saw here was one of the beautiful black racers and it seems fitting to have a snake with a snakewood tree leaf. The favourite soapberries rather abstracted here were on my desk when I was looking for something else to add to the painting. I have been backwards and forwards with this painting.. I tidied it all up got rid of all the brush strokes and it lost its sparkle so spent most of today trying to “rough it up” again
I like this painting. People who don’t like snakes won’t. People who like something more than a landscape might.

I have always liked paintings or images which combine seemingly unconnected elements or objects. They create a mystery and a tension and a story which can be interpreted in different ways according to the ideas and experiences of the viewer. It would be interesting to ask people how they would interpret these two paintings.

I do wish I had a huge airy studio and had been able to tackle something 6 ft x 4 ft, maybe next time.

Ant Contributes

Ant has been helping. He is the most curious creature. Wherever I am working, he appears. If I am on the computer he is clambering over the keyboard or the screen, if I am painting or drawing at the desk he is running around the paper or the brushes. Today he has been living very dangerously, climbing in and out of my acrylics palette and yesterday he made it to the big oak painting, from which I had to remove him before like a little fly in amber, he was glued forever to the canvas in a layer of varnish, giving “caught on canvas” a more sinister meaning. I guess it’s the movement that attracts him. He has never stung me so I don’t think it’s territorial protection. somehow I don’t think ants are capable of affection, but I could be wrong. Hmm .. who knows but it’s nice to have my tiny little companion frolicking about. I really should immortalise him in a drawing or painting somehow.

Ant on the oak branch painting.

Leaf of the Day: Vegetable Plot Sketches

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

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: The Naming of Pods

No drawing today, just sorting. I have much to do this week and I have spent most of the day today trying to remember what I need to get finished before next Tuesday which is when the exhibition has to be up. There is more framing, some more notes to make, some pieces to finish and some more work to do…

But apart from the framed drawings and paintings, I thought that it could be interesting to have some samples of the pods and bits of twigs and seeds etc that I have used as my models and have found so very fascinating.
So most of the day was spent just sorting out the boxes of bits that I have collected over the year. I have 4 boxes full and many pressed leaves to choose from which will be placed in a display case. There is not much room in the case so I must be selective. Something I am not very good at….here are just a few of the many.

I will tag them all with their names and I hope visitors will find it interesting to see these odd bits and pieces which usually lie unnoticed on the ground and will link them with the drawings and the wonderful stories that lie behind the different species.

There are the old favourites, soapberries, lipstick pods, silky hakea etc and some I have not yet got around to drawing. Ant has been busy “helping”, probably not taking too kindly to the disturbance of his extensive adventure playground.

I also started a “book” of pressed leaves which I may display too. It is so time consuming that I didn’t get very far, but is such a lovely record to have, like the old herbaria which I wrote about here.

It’s been wonderful to discover them all again. They are all such exquisite little works of art in their own right. I have spent far too long admiring them all again and still haven’t made my final decision..

Leaf of the Day: Gorgeous Gardenia Pod

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: Busy Bees, Big Paintings and Blog Interview

Me and the bees have been very busy this weekend. I have been working on the big paintings and the bees have just been working. I think the bees are making more progress.

I have taken a few photos recently where the bees are slightly better than just a blur.

Here, approaching the Toothache Tree.

Here, with Lemon Blossom.

Here, on a Banana flower.

Here, high in the sky, with the strange Grevillia flower, which I would love to draw but all are way out of normal human reach.

Here with the Lemon Bottle Brush…where the mocking birds were also helping themselves to the nectar.

Here approaching the stunning, huge Shaving Brush Flower, which I will hopefully paint as one of my white flower series, all those stamens are a bit daunting though.

and lastly on the Sweet Almond..


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A big thank you to Karrita at mymothersgardens.blogspot.com who was also busy getting my images onto blogger. She was kind enough to ask for a short online interview for her interesting series “Artists in the Garden”, which you can read here.
I was delighted to oblige.
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I have been wrestling all weekend with the big tree pattern paintings which have taken on lives of their own (as paintings often do). They are not really as I had planned and were not as simple as I had hoped. The twisting live oak branches are just about finished and the lone pine three quarters finished. Just before I had to stop for the night I added some lightning. The paintings really reflect my experiences of my time here, what I have noticed and what makes an impression on me. The summer storms are spectacular and something I will always remember. Although the paintings are not finished I put them on the wall to get away from them both physically and mentally for a while, but with only a week to go to the exhibition and much to do, they may just stay there.
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Two Trees

Leaf of the Day: The Loquats are Ripe

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: A Mickey Mouse Plant

What could be more appropriate for an Orlando Botanical Garden than the Mickey Mouse Plant, although the label at Leu Gardens more conservatively calls this the Bird’s Eye Bush. It caught my eye with its colourful little yellow flowers and strange little fruits.

This is Ochna serrulata, the Mickey Mouse Plant, or Bird’s Eye Bush,
Originally from Southern Africa this little bush has fragrant yellow flowers in spring and very attractive fruits. These start green and become shiny black and berry-like, suspended below the original bright-red sepals. The birds enjoy them and the flowers are attractive to bees and butterflies. It’s a very nice little novelty plant.

So why Mickey Mouse? Well, its because of the black seeds. One of mine just did happen to have 3 black seeds so how could I resist it??? …and yes, there a million other things I should be doing right now :).

I think he is more Steamboat Willie than modern Mickey.
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Birds Eye Plant