New paintings and regular art updates.
Pink summer Fushias. Looking forward six months and they will be here in June or July. A riot of colour covering our wet and soggy gardem and back yard. I can’t wait. Flowers are uplifting and cheering. They make great subjects to paint and though green has been proved to calm the mind, I think the colours of flowers add joy and happiness… .
Like a lockdown hair style
The garden grows
Longer, taller
Tangled locks,
Like sleeping beauty’s garden
The plants expand.
Ivy clambers
Holly spikes outward.
Buddliea twists and turns
Cut me!
It calls out.
Trim me!
Give me a hedge cut!
But I wait
When the ground is dry
I will fight through it.
I’m watching Gardeners World on BBC TV. They arr showing a compilation programme of the best bits from 2020. One section was about the crocosmia plants that you grow in the garden and the fact that their anticedants came from South Africa.
My garden has crocosmia Lucifer growing in it in the late summer, but its several years old now and I think it’s time to get new bulbs so I’ve painted this to remind myself to get some more..
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Small neat leaves
Spores underneath
Found on a wall
Old stone
Leaves like scales
On an aligators belly
Strong and tough
You survive
Winter
Slightly withered, but seen on my walk today. These daisy type flowers brightened my day. They are in the top of a wall and sheltered slightly under a bush.
I should have collected some of the seeds. I think it’s an Osteospermum, a plant from South Africa, partly because of the leaf shape? They look bigger than Asters? The colours are lovely with their deep yellow centres. If you know what they are please let me know?
I said I would post again about this hanging basket. I’m afraid the frost a couple of nights ago and minus 3.3°c put paid to the begonias, but some of the other plants are still going. Now they are covered in snow and more is forecast over the next few days…. I will see what it looks like whan it’s thawed a bit……
A rose, red as blood. Thorns or thornless, a joyful thing. Here is life and beauty, scent of musk, blooms that attract bees and insects. I remember the rose bush at home when I was a child. It had bright pink roses climbing up some trellis work. We used to collect the petals and try and make scented water out of them. It didn’t really work, but it was fun trying. The rose bush must have been eight or ten feet high and as wide. In the summer the scent was fantastic. I remember it was next to an old shed and the paint on the door was green and bubbling off because of the sunlight. The contrast between the fresh roses and the shed door was so interesting….
You don’t normally find apples still on trees at this time of year. But this was plucked from the back of an apple tree, that sits amongst lots of bushes, this afternoon. Never found one this late in the year before.
Speaking if late apples, hubby bought home four or five little crab apples from branches overlooking the canal on his walk last weekend. I told him not to bring more home as this will be food for small animals or birds over winter.
Outside Portmeirion pottery shop in Stoke. Standard Fushias are still in flower on 23.12.20,some of the leaves are looking a bit sad, but it’s testament to how warm it has been over the few months. My hubby found a ladybird on him last night after he had come in out of the garden. I dropped it off in a flowerpot so it would have somewhere to shelter.
The crazy temperatures that global warming is causing mean that things are staying in flower longer, but there are not many insects around to pollenate them. I pray humanity does work to regulate the worlds temperatures.
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Looking out of the kitchen window and the hanging basket I have taken photos of over the months is still surviving. A lot of the flowers have gone. There are still five or six different plants with flowers on them. The other hanging baskets are wilting. But it’s almost the shortest day (tomorrow) how is it coping!? If we ever get a cold night or snow it might die back. In any case I will post again if it’s still going.
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Mallaband-Brown