I ran home from Helston on Friday, around the lake. I am trying to radically cut down on petrol. I left my car in for repairs and decided not to even take the bus back. Needless to say, I didn’t geo-code as I went, but I looked fast for what I knew and clasped onto water. (It was a hot morning.)

Key things that flitted past me: gorse seed pods, a forest of Foxgloves at Debigna and wow, I am pretty sure a Silver-studded Blue butterfly Plebeius argus on the bar. (I stopped and got close). In ten miles I saw three people. Nice.

Nikki and I last walked the beginning of this route two months ago and recorded the gorse in flower. Above is a drawing of it. We were really concentrating on Goat Willow. (I am just finishing painting this, so more on that later.) But the yellow of the gorse and the willow were running close together, and the smell made us notice the gorse. What Malibu memories it brings back. As its seed pods start to pop, the Western Gorse at the Lizard and Penwith peninsulas will start flowering. (In a month I will embark on painting Western Gorse. Note, this is not found at Loe Pool.)

European Gorse
Ulex europaeus

50.09255
-5.28369

50.09307
-5.28388

50.09395
-5.28397

50.09451
-5.28399

I’ve marked gorse in four places on the map so far, to show how it runs along the North side of the Cober River into the Pool. (The fruit pod explodes when ripe. In dry, sunny weather, the gorse seed pods suddenly open and the seeds explode out, with a noticeable popping noise. The seeds are thrown quite a distance from the plant. http://www.naturegrid.org.uk/biodiversity/plants/fppea.html)

Here’s an example of slow drawing. I was trying to get in some time to draw the Goat Willow Salis caprea. It was so magnificent, intriguing and fun at Easter. I can only describe it as a miniature acid and mild yellow toilet brush. I knew it would take me at least eight hours to draw. I knew from previous drawings how I wanted to do it, just like this Common Fig Ficus carica.

However, I just missed focussing on the best flowering days and so I have to wait for another year to carry out the plan. I have a flower press now (a very nice donation) and I need to get a macro lens and tripod to get a better image than this. Then at least if I need to spend more than one day on it, I will have some great reference.

(Goat Willow Salix caprea Dark green, sub-glossy leaves are pointed and only shallowly toothed. Unstalked, single scaled, yellow-green buds hug the stem. Much broader, erect catkins, separate sex trees and fruit like cotton-wool. Harding, P. & Tomblin, G. (1998) How to Identify Trees Italy: Collins)

Since April, around every two or three weeks, Nikki and I have been walking around the same part of Loe pool. We meet after work, head down there, study the same trees and look at the changes. I talk to Nikki about botanical drawing and she discusses photography and horticulture. She makes me look at leaf shapes, bud activity, size variation… We both delight in colour changes.

Over the spring, there was a mass of acid green and acid yellow. This was due to trees such as the Norway Maple adorning the riverside and Goat Willow hiding in the wetland. This was all against a backdrop of yellow-flowering gorse and white-flowering blackthorne. Now, the Yellow Flag Iris Iris pseudacorus is showing yellow, and ‘helicopters’ cling to a large number of trees.

Here’s part of our re-walk forming. When theirwork’s map is editable, I will start adding descriptions for the plants that we are learning.

common alder (2), n 50.09635, w 005.28209
holly (male), n 50.08707, w 005.28550
jay, n 50.02951, w 005.24851
red fungi, n 50.09137, w 005.28367
honey suckle, n 50.09136, w 005.28374
hazle (1), n 50.08831, w005.28377
hazle (2), n 50.08633, w 005.28733
hazle (3), n 50.08591, w 005.28817
yellow flag iris, n 50.09070, w 005.28350

We hope to continue with such walking and build on ideas for recording information. Nikki’s photographing down there anyway, and I have started a new project called ‘Plant and Place’, which will be launched as a long-term botanical art project later this year. This project will be about ’slow drawing’. Botanical work takes a long time, a lot of practice and patience. To inform the work, I am continuing with such training as outlined in one of my posts called slow drawing I have planned to receive further training from Mally Francis to help guide this work. One of the spaces (or one of the places) given to this project will of course be here, this walk at Loe Pool. This work will of course link to theirwork and I hope artwork concerning Loe Pool can feed into the map, along with other peoples’ drawing and photography.

We have lots of questions about trees. Like this one, here I have drawn the Italian Alder Alnus cordata. When I started it, I thought it was a native tree to the area, the Common Alder Alnus glutinosa but I found out that some of the Alders in Cornwall might have been planted as Italian instead of Common by a mistake! The cones of the foreign variety are bigger and the leaf is heart shaped not blunt.

Italian Alder Alnus cordata

Whilst honing in on my qualitative research planning, I am also enhancing some drawing skills in the area of botanical illustration. Why is this? Well there’s the personal issue of how over time, like many other artists/designers, I am spending more and more time on the computer and less and less time drawing. Others (usually traditional artists and traditional lovers of art) find this distasteful. I just find it disconcerting. Disconcerting because I am not learning to transfer my skill of drawing very well to the computer. I don’t believe many others are either. With regards to my drawing, I think it’s due to the tools and computer interface I use but also my lack of experimentation and confidence. So I am concentrating on enhancing some drawing skills in the hope that I will find a way in which to develop such skills by way of experimentation with the computer. In the past I have achieved a modicum of this by using packages like streamline, freehand and illustrator, but first I used soft pencils, pastels, chalks, potatoes and scanners. However, on a more specific issue, the other reason I am looking to develop this type of drawing skill is to study how botanical illustrations that capture the form and essence of a botanical specimen could be represented online. Currently, you see such illustrations in a book or as framed pictures hung in a gallery or arboretum. I really want to discover if such illustrations, or parts of such illustrations, could be designed for online use.

All in all this work is perhaps not relevant to theirwork, but if not directly, I think indirectly. I have just spent the day with a group of ten botanical artists who were having a day of training from Pandora Sellars, one of the world’s top botanical artists. I was introduced to Pandora and explained how I wanted to develop an online drawing style or/and understand how to link to botanical artists that were interested. She liked it, and the fact that I wanted to link to sustainable issues - “and a purpose” she said “great”.

Throughout the day Pandora concentrated on composition. She did this by encouraging the class to bring different drawn elements into one image, and by focussing on detail and line. At the end of the day she reinforced what I had been reading about, how the practice of botanical illustration is one of slow drawing. You take your time. You plan. You re-organise. You observe continually. You often have to indulge in several different specimens, you might have to adapt your drawing. But first, you have to really think: What’s this drawing for?

This was so exciting to hear as I realised how much it related to the development of slow software. How you take your time when developing something, you work on it over time, you respond to what’s happening, to the people that are using the software, to the changes. And you must decide: What is this piece of work for, what will it effect?

During the training with Pandora I took my time drawing. I spent hours drawing one object. I kept thinking, “I am indulging too much”. But when I got home I understood that this was an important day for my work, as not only did I find time to observe a species all day long, I was asked to make a slow drawing. I realised that I had only been carrying out quick drawings for a number of years.

Pandora Sellars finished off the day by saying how great botanical illustration was because it was so portable. “All you need is a pencil, a box of paints and a piece of paper, and you can go anywhere in the world and make an object like this.” She showed us her current work. I can’t describe the detail. It was immense. It looked totally accurate, every hair on the stem had been highlighted, but it was still so alive and the lines were so energetic.

Since that day I have spent some time researching into contemporary botanical artists. It is interesting to see why some of them are employed, and to compare this to in the Victorian era. I might do a literature review on my findings, but first of all I have to type up my qualitative research literature review. It takes precedence.

Thinking about these two areas of work and the term slowness, I am interested, if in the future, botanical artists would want to add their work to maps of an environment, creating visual habitat data, or even the habitat layer of the map. Or maybe, thinking broader in terms of drawings and users, a community group, such as a school or an adult evening class, would like to add their own drawings to online maps.