garden of earthly delights

The end of another week, the last Friday of July, how quickly it all goes.
Today, like yesterday, is cool and overcast. We're expecting more rain. The ash tree that has been shedding all week will appreciate that more than any of the other plants that seem to be doing so well...

like the black hollyhocks amid the clematis

Of course the hollyhocks are not really black but a deep maroon

On the other side of the composter are various plants like Echinacea and lavender

The Echinacea always seem to have benign bumblebees in them

that don't seem to mind me getting up so close to them

while they busy themselves with the task at hand

There are also sweetpeas growing up the composter walls.

Wally's garden is coming along very well, especially the peas that are too heavy to climb very far up the green trellises Wally erected for them. Peas for lunch, peas for snacks, peas for supper.

The beans are just coming in on the lefthand trellis and to their right the zucchinis, then the beets, then carrots and in the back and throughout Dill and Cilantro.

There were so many bumblebees in the cilantro. You rarely see so many together.

The bumblebee got away in this shot, but I decided to take advantage of this exposure of Cilantro blossoms.

On the pea trellis this hornet appeared to be having a nap and let me get quite close to it.

On the far side of our yard I can peer into the neighbours' poppy garden

There is a mass of berries on the mystery tree that grows from their yard into ours.

I must do some homework on this.

The black currants ripen a few at a time, and don't grow like grapes the way I once imagined.

The hayfield has been filling in nicely since it was mowed on the first of the month,

and the goldenrod, harbingers of autumn, are coming into bloom. 

Looking over to my right, Wally has cut a swath out between the massive rose bush and the equally massive back of our hedge.

The little maple tree is not so little anymore. I swear it's grown 2 feet this summer.

Wally mows around it now that I've trimmed the honeysuckle to the left, barely unrecognizable with the grass and lupins growing around and through it.

This is the first time I've noticed that Honeysuckle have a fruit all their own

And who ever looks at the grainy seed head of grass?

I'm so happy with this camera for close-ups.

Another thing I'd never noticed is how the Lupin seed pods spiral open to drop their seed.

This is a vague memory for me- that cow vetch has a seed pod.

I don't think I've noticed this since I was a child.

This camera life, this blogging, has taught me so much.

Heading back up to the house (there is a definite slope to this part of the yard) I head toward the Hydrangea, still bowed from last night's rain

Wally wanted me to look for the bird's nest he saw there.

It has been abandoned, and now it is squished from the weight of the branches.

What I love about it is the animal hair lining the nest. I find this very touching somehow.

So beautiful.

In the middle garden, the succulents we call Hens and Chicks is blooming.

And the Hostas too

I hadn't realized until a few years ago that they are lilies.

Back in the house, someone needs attention

Three Sprites

pencil crayon and India Ink Pitt pen 

And today, because I've been so happily busy making pictures, a "two-for-one". 

I rarely have so much work back-logged. This little Dancer, also done in coloured pencils with Pitt pen has a little white Sharpie paint pen too, but what's really unusual is that the body and the hair are done in Winsor & Newton pigment markers which I believe are alcohol based and absorb a little too readily into this sketchbook paper. I believe marker paper is less absorbent allowing for more blendability. Because I've been storing the marker upright instead of horizontally, I sometimes get less saturation which helped keep the skin tones more subtle.

With that, I will carry on here. Always something calling me to get done. Who would we be without some external thing calling us, defining us, ethereal beings that we are?

"We are not human beings having a spiritual experience.

We are spiritual beings having a human experience." 

                                                                                                    Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

indulgences

There is only one natural perfume I've always said should be bottled and that is the flowers of milkweed. We haven't seen much of that out our way, but...

roses- wild roses- bloom everywhere- and their gentle scent, only by virtue of hundreds of them

fills the air.

Our little honeysuckle bush is producing lovely flowers

whose delicate sweet scent is even more appealing to me.

They make a lovely wild display with the few remaining lupins and tall grasses

The monster wild rose bush is producing too.

It towers over me

with a promise of thousands more of its simple 5 petal flowers

This scene of massive wild rose bushes across the hayfield is not unusual out here.

The seed head of a  Western Salsify (Tragopogon Dubius) is very dubious indeed,

looking like a dandelion on steroids. 

 It is considered an invasive weed, native to southern and central Europe, growing as far north as western France. Common to western Asia, it has been seen in Kashmir and India. Introduced to North America, it has spread throughout the continent though it doesn't seem to have done well in places like Canada's Newfoundland, Inuvik and the Northwest Territories. Can't take the cold, eh?

 Apparently it is edible- the roots being very bitter when raw, but fried, roasted, or boiled, they taste like parsnips.  Purée the roots in a soup or simmer young stalks in butter for a side dish rich in Vitamin B6. Thank you internet!

Wandering around to the vegetable garden, I spy a slender visitor on the cabin's door.

The cilantro is coming along very nicely.

So many people detest the taste of it. Wally did once, but has since acquired a palate for it, so good in Mexican guacamole and pico de gallo, and Asian dishes.

It has become a staple in our diet once learning that it's capacity for removing heavy metals from the body helped Wally with a tremor he developed 3 years ago. Within 6 weeks of juicing with it, his shakes were gone. Hallelujah!

I even dosed Babu, our adopted black cat,  with a tea I made of  it when he developed a reaction to the heavy metals in human grade beef fat (Yes! really!) in his raw food diet that no one seems to understand is not a funny squirrely behaviour, but a real discomfort, a condition called hyperesthesia. Small doses only as cats don't do well on the alkalinity of plant material which can cause alkaline stones in their bladders, most life-threatening in males who can become plugged. We have since put Babu on a supplemented cooked beef diet in order to remove as much of the fat- that separates in the cooking- as possible. Now he's "full of beans!"

As I sat by the garden, a long-legged with an even longer abdomen,

bug hovered in the grass beside me.

I'm guessing this is some kind of spider/insect eating wasp, akin to the parasitic anomalon.

It seemed rather benign to me, somewhat ungainly, as if it didn't know how to hand its long legs, long antennae and body.

That was Friday.

Truth be told, I was feeling under the weather that day, a bit of a blob.

Wally got home from work and suggested we go off to Michael's, a big box craft store not very far away.  We had two 50% off coupons burning a hole in our pockets, but as I always do, I headed off for the clearance corner and found these lovely real stone beads drastically reduced.

One of my coupons went for this Tim Holtz collection of old photo cut-outs, and then Wally, knowing my taste in these things, came to me with this reduced pack of fabric tape. Love!

I don't think I've ever done a post on an "Art Supply Haul", something that is very common in the arts and crafts community and throughout the internet every kind of commercial product I suppose.

I'm somewhat embarrassed by the wealth we take for granted here in the western world, but seeing that it is rare and that we rarely go out for dinner, never to the movies or theatre, lay low on new clothes, etc., I'm making this exception. I'll blame it on still feeling a bit ho-hum.

The  pièce de résistance that evening was this collection of Jane Davenport "Magic Wands" that I have been resisting since last winter as I am well supplied with coloured pencils: American Prismacolors, British Derwents and going back to my childhood (I keep everything it seems) Canadian Laurentiens and Eagle Canadianas. There went my other 50% off coupon.

Jane sells her line in a palette where everything works together.

And, in keeping with her wit, she has named them rather whimsically

which tends to go with her teaching style

making art fun and accessible. 

I don't think I'll ever get over the delight of new art supplies.

Jane calls her penchant for colour, "rainbowitis", and is happy to pass it on.

As you may already know from past work, I tend to bob around between neutral-non-colours to bright in-your-face colour depending on my mood. These pencils are pleasant to use and blend well together, some more pigmented than others.

Before we left the store that night, I gave in to another indulgence that I have been resisting on several past visits. These are the kind of markers designers and manga cartoon artists use.

 Alcohol based, these very expensive Winsor&Newton pigment markers were drastically reduced, making this set still very expensive even at almost 80% off. Christmas in July.

On Saturday morning, Wally made us a blueberry smoothie that went well both in taste and colour with the new Jane Davenport pencil crayon drawing I had been working on. I created the faces, one after the other starting with the top left one and working my way through a compostion in the shape of a letter 3, intending to see how the new pencils worked with each other.

That's a Jane Davenport facebook page on the computer.

We drove through a wicked rainstorm on Saturday.

I'll post about that next.

Til then I'll leave you with this favourite Bill Murray quote:

"The more relaxed you are, the better you are at everything: the better you are with your loved ones, the better you are with your enemies, the better you are at your job, the better you are with yourself."