Tag: watercolour

Leaf of the Day: Just Three Colours and a Flying Saucer Patti Pan.

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There have been 2 little pattipan squash in the fruit bowl for ages. I had been meaning to draw them..then we ate one. So on Saturday, wanting a couple more to draw and use as a basis for the colour exercises. I went to Winter Park Farmer’s market to buy one from Herbert who calls them UFO’s …only to find none at all. Maybe the season is over? But that was just typical of a weekend when many good intentions were thwarted by circumstances beyond our control.
However when I finally stopped searching for missing pattipans, I did get down to a few colour experiments. At last I have made a proper chart of transparent colours and started on the granulating ones which, to me add so much to the beautiful texture of loose watercolours. Making charts takes hours but is very good therapy and gives you the impression you are really doing something useful. Then I made some very simple colour experiments using just 3 colours, Permanent Rose, Phthalo Blue and Aureolin. This really follows on from Sue Archer’s great class here. It’s one of those “practising your scales” exercises, not of huge interest to anyone other than yourself. Important in that it keeps you disciplined and it reminds you of how beautiful transparent watercolours can be if you don’t mess about with them too much. So the following are all from just those 3 colours nothing else. Firstly, using the colours as they are, then mixing and using the complementaries and, finally, mixing greys from the three and overlaying them. The transparency means the colours stay clearer and crisper even after several glazes.

Here are a few I thought were interesting. Tomorrow I shall be doing a drawing of the little pattipan. It is such a lovely shape and is creamy white tinged with the palest green.
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Three Colour Exercises

Leaf of the Day: The Ginger Pod Again.

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I really wanted to draw this little pod in its new state. It has changed so much in the last week. It seems that the seeds inside have grown larger and are pushing outwards causing the pod to split in 3 places. Even since yesterday it has changed, the seeds are slightly bigger and less green. It is the pod of the shell ginger I had sketched a couple of times a few days ago here. The changes are interesting, the colour has gone from a brighter greeny orange to deeper orange and reds and of course the seeds pushing out have caused the shape to become more squashed. It’s fascinating. Sadly it fell off its stem which was pushed into some oasis so it had definitely lost some elegance, but it’s still lovely.

Another Friday has rushed round and I shall be taking some time off plants this weekend to return to some colour experiments and exercises. I have been trying to fit them in while doing everything else but as Fred Astaire said ‘somethin’s gotta give’. I enjoy colour and while the botanical illustration course is interesting it doesn’t allow at all for anything messy or experimental. The colour challenge with botanics is about seeing and matching colour as exactly as you can, and frankly I am getting in need of a bit of freedom so I will be doing some experiments this weekend. If the results are pleasing or even interesting I will post them. Many are not but such is the nature of experiments. Of course there may be a plant, seed pod, or leaf theme in there somewhere.
However, even if it is just coloured squares, as an artist, as long as you are actually doing something you have hope of progress. Many, including myself, would really rather just ‘imagine’ those leaps and strides we will make on our way to becoming the great artist we are doubtless destined to be, and go for a beer instead. There may be some fine displacement activity taking place this weekend too as I have to admit I got a bit of a taste for it on our last lazy weekend. The pool, the bar, the books, the DVD ‘s, general mooching … or the colour exercises. Hmmmm….right now the colour exercises are losing!
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Shell Ginger Pod 2

Leaf of the Day: Coral Bean and Bay Bean

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Just the last couple of things from my weekend away, and it wouldn’t be long before I got round to some more pods would it? Again, from near the railroad walk, I found a tatty old Bay Bean pod and a Coral Bean pod with its stunningly red beans inside.

The Bay Bean Canavalia rosea, exuberant, tough, hardy, salt tolerant and very vigorous..it runs, almost literally, along the sand dunes rooting its way along from nodes on the stem and can reach 20 feet in one stretch. The flower is small and a beautiful purple. It’s good for anchoring unstable sandy places and is pretty too, although I am not sure you would want this galloping around a small garden. These beans float and so can be carried by the sea many miles along the coast to spring up in territories new.


The above image is from the excellent site on sea beans here

The beans are edible when very young, as are the pods and I think the flowers are too but as with other beans the old ones must be cooked well to remove toxins.
It would seem that Captain Cook ate bay beans during his Australian explorations and in 1788 the Australian Governor Phillip and his crew tried them too. The Surgeon General John White wrote that the beans “were well tasted”, but evidently they had old raw beans for they were soon “seized with violent vomiting”.
The Australian Aborigines cooked and ate the beans and used them medicinally but I cannot find any reference to their use by native Americans.

Coral Beans Erythrina herbaceacan also get carried along by the sea too. The seeds are such a brilliant orange red and so attractive. I love the way these grey black pods split open to show the seeds inside. They are often used in jewellery making in Central America, but they are definitely poisonous, so don’t chew that Mexican necklace too often.
I can’t remember seeing a flower myself but here is a picture from Wiki.

I am wondering what sort of seeds the coral trees will have at Leu. If I had a spare 5 minutes I would be making beautiful beaded things. Bead shops are some of my favourite places and seed jewellery deserves a few dedicated posts which is a very good excuse for going to some bead shops.

This is yet another prickly plant and those of you who get the email subscription will see I am posting Friday 18th (back dated) entry today, the Victoria Waterlily, another terrifyingly spiny plant.

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Bay Bean and Coral Bean

Leaf of the Day: Water Oak, John Muir and Spanish Bayonet

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The Water Oak, Quercus nigra, is another tree I saw on the railway track walk on Sunday that was conveniently labelled. It’s too early for the acorns to be developed to any degree but they are still a lovely shape. The other names for the Water Oak are Possom Oak, Duck Oak, Punk Oak. ( I am not entirely sure of the reason for these names, except in the duck oak case, the leaf is said to resemble a ducks foot..a bit.) It is a beautiful tree and would have provided firewood, building timber and shelter to native Americans and early settlers alike.

The railway line from Cedar Key Island ran across to the mainland and all that remains now are the broken stumps of the pilings.

We were the only ones on this little track and amongst several different species of oaks, laurels, the black mangroves and 5 million mosquitoes there was the Spanish Bayonet. A ferocious Yucca, (Yucca aloifolia) with long spiked leaves this just adds to my current run of armed and dangerous plants that can be a hazard to the careless walker in Florida.
John Muir the writer and early conservationist had time to contemplate this plant too. In 1868 he spent 3 months at Cedar Key recovering from a bad bout of malaria which had caused him to break his walk from Indiana to South America. In his account of that journey ” A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf” he gives a grim description of malaria, but also tells of the kindness with which he was nursed at Cedar Key. Having now had a close encounter with a Spanish Bayonet I know his description is accurate.

“One of the characteristic plants of these keys is the Spanish bayonet, a species of yucca, about eight or ten feet in height, and with a trunk three or four inches in diameter when full grown. It belongs to the lily family and develops palmlike from terminal buds. The stout leaves are very rigid, sharp-pointed and bayonet-like. By one of these leaves a man might be as seriously stabbed as by an army bayonet, and woe to the luckless wanderer who dares to urge his way through these armed gardens after dark. Vegetable cats of many species will rob him of his clothes and claw his flesh, while dwarf palmettos will saw his bones, and the bayonets will glide to his joints and marrow without the smallest consideration for Lord Man. “


This lovely old photo of the Spanish Bayonet from a very interesting webpage about Texas plants here

Muir goes on to describe the beauty and the birds too

“During my long sojourn here as a convalescent I used to lie on my back for whole days beneath the ample arms of these great trees, listening to the winds and the birds. There is an extensive shallow on the coast, close by, which the receding tide exposes daily. This is the feeding-ground of thousands of waders of all sizes, plumage, and language, and they make a lively picture and noise when they gather at the great family board to eat their daily bread, so bountifully provided for them.
Their leisure in time of high tide they spend in various ways and places. Some go in large flocks to reedy margins about the islands and wade and stand about quarrelling or making sport, occasionally finding a stray mouthful to eat. Some stand on the mangroves of the solitary shore, now and then plunging into the water after a fish. Some go long journeys in-land, up creeks and inlets.

A few lonely old herons of solemn look and wing retire to favorite oaks. It was my delight to watch those old white sages of immaculate feather as they stood erect drowsing away the dull hours between tides, curtained by long skeins of tillandsia. White-bearded hermits gazing dreamily from dark caves could not appear more solemn or more becomingly shrouded from the rest of their fellow beings. “

We found it still much the same…

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Water Oak

Leaf of the Day: Dancing Lady Ginger Flower

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With so many gingers springing up and flowering I am going to try to devote the next few days mainly to drawing gingers and their relations. This one is probably the most complicated flower I have tackled so far and it may well not get past this sketch stage.

But how can such an astonishingly dainty little thing like this be given such an ungainly Latin name. However you say it, Globba winitii does not trip lightly off the tongue.

This little plant originated from Thailand and Vietnam and arrived in Europe in the 1700s. Linnaeus named them, possibly from their Indionesean name “galoba” which seems slightly more attractive, but this branch of the ginger family can certainly rise above its awkward taxonomy purely on looks alone.
Globba winitii is one of many varieties of globba, all differing in design and colour. The dangling inflorescence is adorned with purple bracts and delicate yellow flowers and the slightest puff of wind has them dancing like little puppets. They are said to look like traditional Thai dancers or possibly tiny fire breathing dragons, there is a particularly pretty white version called White Dragon.


There are many good photos and information about cultivation and varieties of gingers on this site. http://www.gingersrus.com/ and the image of the white dragon is from http://www.heliconiaparadise.com/
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Dancing Lady Ginger

Leaf of the Day: Indian Ginger Flower

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I have been thinking that Leu Gardens really needs several small booklets as a guide to the more exotic plants to be found in the 50 acres with several different titles, one being “Eat your way round the Garden”. I suppose health and safety issues here, in the land of the very affluent fat cat litigation lawyers, would prohibit such a publication and it could all go horribly wrong. To my very certain knowledge there are some potentially deadly things in the bushes as well as very edible herbs, fruits, leaves and roots. Just on Friday Pedro showed me the delicious bright red cherry like fruits of the Malpighia emarginata, the Barbados Cherry which grows happily untouched in the Demonstration Garden.

This sketch today is of one little floret from the inflorescence of the Alpina calcarata the Indian ginger. This is not the ginger root which we see in the supermarkets which comes from Zingiber officinale but is from the same aromatic family.

One of the “shell” gingers (so called because of the pretty shell like flowers), it is a native plant of India and is also known as the cardamon ginger or false cardamon. This is a lovely, tall and elegant plant with long slender leaves and can reach a good 5 foot. The little flowers, which somewhat resemble snapdragons (it’s also called Snap ginger) are held upright in spikes, and are a pretty bluey white with yellow and reddish-maroon stripes. The ‘edible’ parts are the leaves, which can be used to flavour steamed rice, for tea like infusions or as wraps for fish and, as I am holding them in my hands the flowers smell faintly of ginger…lovely.
It is also used in medical preparations in India in Ayurvedic medicine and ginger in general is well known to help control nausea and as a powerful digestive aid.

From the strange ‘beehive’ gingers to ‘dancing ladies’ and the heliconias, this family of plants is both beautiful and useful. If I had a garden here (and it would have to be acres and acres) I would definitely plant gingers and become a ginger expert.

There is an old Sanskrit saying “Adrakam sarva kandanaam” which means “Every good quality is found in the ginger.”
This is another useful phrase for the boring dinner party which will no doubt impress and alienate the other guests in equal measure. I am becoming the nightmare dinner party guest who can waffle on ad nauseam (better have that ginger dessert ready!) about things that probably only a handful of people in the whole world are interested in. Pedro politely describes me as very nice, if a little eccentric, (but then it won’t be long before the mother ship comes to collect me so I shouldn’t worry).

This little flower is a candidate for the next submission for the course, if I can find one in bloom in a couple of weeks time when I am due to start the finished work.
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Indian Ginger Flower

Leaf of the Day: Heliconia Clinophila, First Sketch

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Today I spent most of my time in the jungly shade garden at Leu Gardens where Pedro showed me the absolutely stunning Heliconias which hide away in this quiet part of the garden. You have to brave some extensive spiders webs and ten million mosquitoes but what you see makes up for the hardship.

They are truly wonderful plants with a variety of structurally superb flowers that either hang in pendants or are held erect in a variety of showy spikes properly known as panciles. (A pancile is a branched cluster of flowers.)
They are part of the most fascinating order, the Zingiberaceae, or the Ginger family, and come in a variety of shapes and sizes. The definition from Wiki is:
“A family of flowering plants consisting of aromatic perennial herbs with creeping horizontal or tuberous rhizomes, comprising of 52 genera and more than 1300 species, distributed throughout tropical Africa, Asia and the Americas.”
Many species are important ornamental plants, spices, or medicinal plants including shell gingers, ginger lily, turmeric and cardamom.
The name Helicona, after the Mt Helicon fits well with the exotic and strange appearance of these plants. Mount Helicon was the home of the muses forever beautiful and inspirational and the mountain itself wreathed in the mysteries of the gods.

The heliconia’s bracts are large and colorful and hide the sometimes inconspicuous flowers The fruits also develop within the bracts which are often filled with water and house a distinctive aquatic micro-ecosystem much like the bromeliad tank plants which I wrote about before.


In the tropics, the natural home of the heliconias, many rely solely on hummingbirds for their pollination which accounts for their bright red yellow and orange colouring, and the long tubelike shape of the flowers, which ensures that only hummingbirds with their long curved bills and and even longer tongues can access the rich nectar.

It is another example of a mutually exclusive relationship between animal and plant, with some heliconias relying on one specific humming bird for pollination. The different species also “use” the birds in different ways, making sure that the design of the flowers deposits pollen on different parts of the hummingbird’s body so avoiding the contamination of another nearby species.


This beautiful image from gonetoamerica blog here

According to the page on heliconias here from the Cloudbridge project in Costa Rica, the big leaves also provide a home
“for disk-wing bats (bats with suction-cups on their wings) and several species of tent-making bats. These bats construct shelters for themselves by chewing along both sides of the midrib of Heliconia leaves, so that the sides fold down, making temporary “tents.”

Some very cute tent bats from Costa Rica, from a fab site of images of Costa Rica here , one of the many things we didn’t see there and all the more reason to go back.
And I wish I had taken a bit more notice of the flowers, but writing this has reminded me of the very frightened tourist who came on a tour of the Monteverde reserve with us. She was wearing a red t shirt and to her terror was constantly surrounded by little humming birds who according to the guide thought she was a flower. Lucky her I thought. Here in Florida there are not many hummingbirds, but if you are lucky enough, you would be most likely to see the redthroated variety.


Sweet pic from a hummingbird migration site here

I have never seen one at Leu yet but I am not there at dawn and dusk (yet ! ) which is the best time to see them. They are gorgeous little things.

I found an old rather broken piece of the Heliconia clinophia but love its strong rhythmical zig zag profile and the seed pods which spray out of the bracts. I will certainly try some of the other flowers soon too. It is a big piece, 16 inches across, so it will have to be painted on a half sheet piece of watercolour paper. Today I only had time to do these initial sketches, one small study of the bract and as you can see, the larger sketch across two sides of the sketchbook.

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Heliconia Clinophila

Leaf of the Day: Bald Cypress Leaf and Carolina Parkeet Part 2

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Having drawn the cone and spent hours trying to find the identity of the little yellow “flowers” on the needles (still no result), I decided to stay with the bald cypress and tackle a leaf. I will probably never do one again unless I am paid an inordinate amount of money. I prefer bigger simple leaves and I am afraid to say that by needle number 30 I was just bored.(there are a lot more)…perhaps bigger…perhaps in acrylics or gouache or even oils …perhaps just leave these to other more patient people.

I also started reading more about the fate of the little Parakeet, and of course, if Catesby had painted it, Audubon had too. While researching both I came across a fascinating article from the LA Times by Jonathan Rosen, February 24, 2008 entitled “What a Little Bird told us”

“They were large, colorful, noisy birds, found from the Ohio Valley to the Gulf of Mexico. John James Audubon noted the decline in the Carolina parakeet back in the mid-19th century, but the birds hung on in the wild until the turn of the 20th century. The last known Carolina parakeet died in the Cincinnati Zoo 90 years ago, on Feb. 21, 1918. His name was Incas. He had outlived Martha, the very last passenger pigeon — which also died in the Cincinnati Zoo — by four years. Once you get a celebrity cage and a human name, it is usually over for your species.”

The reason the birds were not saved was because of a woeful inability of the zoos to coordinate a breeding programme. They were persecuted to extinction through a combination of hunting, for their feathers to decorate ladies hats, a perception that they were harmful pests and the loss of habitat. But this very thoughtful article goes on to explore some difficult issues that we humans have to face with our primate killer natures and our conservationist desires and duties.
In 1898 Frank Chapman an important ornithologist and a great advocate of conservation went to find the parakeet and …
“unable to resist gathering rare specimens, shot them. Looking at the bodies laid out before him, he vowed to shoot no more of the birds. But later that day, he stumbled on another small cluster and killed them too. “Good resolutions,” he wrote, “like many other things, are much easier to plan than to practice.” “

Rosen also sites Audubon as an example of this complex “killing urge and the conserving urge“. That Audubon was a great lover of birds is without doubt, but he was also a great hunter and did of course kill the birds he painted so evocatively. There are mixed opinions about his methods and luckily, we admirers today can try to record their beauty harmlessly with cameras. I am going to read more about Audubon he was a fascinating man and there are some strange stories sourrounding his childhood.
The article concludes with a plea for conservation while trying to understand some of the contradictions we, as ‘hunters’ and self centred creatures, find in ourselves. I personally find killing anything for “sport” particularly abhorrent. To me, it speaks volumes about those who take part in it, but Rosen argues that
“…balance is the key — the watcher and the watched, the hunter and the conservationist, the talking parrot and the killer primate. All of us need to shoulder the responsibility of becoming “citizen scientists,” or at least “citizen naturalists.” We might as well begin by remembering Incas, last of his species, a wild animal with a human name who died in a zoo 90 years ago.
Follow this link to read the whole article it is definitely worth a 5 minute read.

“Citizen scientists” coined by the Audubon Society, are those many ordinary people whose enthusiasm for wildlife help our understanding of what is going on in the natural world, for example in 2007 more than 400,000 participants took part in the Big Garden Birdwatch organised by the RSPB in the UK. For one hour they counted the birds in their gardens and together they spotted 6 million birds across 236,000 gardens. I just don’t understand why some people feel the need to go and shoot them.
However with the deepening crisis in the economy and rising food prices there was report today that one of the major supermarkets in the UK are security tagging chickens, so perhaps the birds of the UK had better keep their heads down.
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Bald Cypress Leaf

Leaf of the Day: Magnolia, an Ancient Beauty and a Ghost town

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The Magnolia, Queen of the South. How could I take so long to get round to making some studies from this beautiful tree which grows everywhere here, big and small, in Malls, in gardens, round offices, and in the parks. There are approximately 80 different species and many of them seem happy to grow in and around Orlando.

I had no idea that the magnolia family was so ancient, but fossil remains have been found dating between 36 and 58 million years and I like to think of them growing side by side with the cycads and ferns, the ginkgos and the dinosaurs. The huge and beautiful flowers we see here on the Magnolia grandiflora are also considered a simple, primitive flower. It does not have petals as such, but tepals, a neat little anagram. Tepals are a tricky concept as they look like petals but are sepals and petals joined together. (Some well known flowers which you think have lovely petals actually have lovely tepals ie: tulips and lilies.) Another throwback to their ancient past is that magnolias evolved before there were bees so are pollinated by beetles. There is no nectar in these flowers but a rich protein filled pollen which the beetles seek out for food.

Magnolias are named after Pierre Magnol, a 17th century French botanist who was Professor of Botany and Director of the Royal Botanic Garden of Montpellier ( important as one of the innovators of the current botanical scheme of classification.) It is rather ironic, I think, that these beautiful ancient trees known for centuries by other cultures and by other names would be named after a European.
England had no native magnolias, but in 1687 the sweet bay magnolia (Magnolia virginiana) was sent to the Bishop of London by one of his American missionaries. More species arrived from America and later Asia and now the magnolia is one of the most popular flowering trees gracing gardens all across the world.

The blooms here are amazing and I will, I am sure, get round to painting one of them one day but today here are 2 little furry “burrs” which you can find scattered around the base of magnolia trees after a storm. They are the centre part of the flower that remains after the tepals and the stamens have fallen away. You can see in my photo above that this flower has already lost its stamens. The dots below on the middle section of the receptacle are where stamens were and, below that, the tepal scars. The little black curls are the remains of the stigmas which were once yellow, each one leading down to its own carpel which in due course will produce the beautiful red seeds in the twisty seed pods which I, like so many other artists before me, will be drawing and painting over and over again.

Curiously, as a footnote, here in Orlando as we are following the progress of hurricane Bertha, listening for news of impending storms and severe weather warnings, considering our evacuation route and essential supplies list, I came across an account of the ghost town of Magnolia. It was once a thriving little cotton port in North Florida until, due to economic factors and a severe hurricane in 1843, it became one of Florida’s ghost towns. It seems this particular hurricane was very thorough in its devastation of the Gulf coast. The New York Herald called it “ one of the most dreadful hurricanes we have ever remembered to have occurred on this continent” . The 10 ft storm surge badly destroyed the Ports of St Leon, and St Marks, and the once thriving port of St Joseph, already in decline due to yellow fever was washed away. Once you start reading about the history of hurricanes in Florida you do wonder why anyone ever stayed to battle the weather, the mosquitoes and the tropical fevers..however Orlando’s 220,000 inhabitants are stirring, the sun is up, the lake is as calm as a mill pond, and Dan the weather man is smiling. I am going to Leu Gardens to make the most of this hurricane free day.
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Magnolia Burrs

Leaf of the Day: Another Aristolochia

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I did want to have one more try with this plant. This is another variety which grows at Leu on one of the creeper trellis. To me this is not quite so repellent but I still feel ambivalent about it. This variety is Aristolochia cymbifera.It is probably 10 inches in length and it still retains the fleshy feel but is more spectacularly striped and spotted with its flounced frill of petal and strange horn. All this to entice flies.
Here also are two diagrams that explain a little bit more about the structures of the various flowers.

I am trying to redress the balance somewhat though, as these strange plants do attract beautiful butterflies in their droves. One of the aristolochia that grows in the Butterfly Garden at Leu is reugularly attended by many fluttering beauties. I have seen mostly monarch butterflies and swallowtails and a little creeping aristolochia growing near the Vegetable Garden has been almost eaten away by what I think are pipevine swallowtail caterpillars.

On 11th June it looked like this…

on the 16th June it looked like this …

Having been eaten by these …

If I am right , there will be some of these flying about soon..

The beautiful pipe vine swallowtail butterfly Battus philenor .


This image from Carolinanature.com here

But, it seems we can’t quite escape the dark side of these flowers completely, as, in a rather sinister twist, when the caterpillars eat the vines they ingest some of the poisons, which are so deadly to us, and they in turn become toxic to their prey. In another instance, one dangerous species of this vine is proving poisonous to the swallowtail caterpillars, it’s Russian roulette with this one.

The sketch I made today was to understand the patterns and shapes, I might return to this flower to make a more finished painting or drawing as I do like the patterns and the challenge of the soft and hard shapes. It’s still a bit of a monster though isnt it?

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Aristolochia Cymbifera