equinoctial garden

The carnival of Sunflowers is over for the bees and the people (seeds left for the birds), and the long Fox Glove bombus party is a season ago but there are many Survivors in the garden, budding and blooming and playing on.

A Cobea bud! Also known as Cup and Saucer vine and Cathedral Bells, i grew this plant last year but had no flowers. I was fearing the worst again this year but spotted a couple of odd shaped leaves while i was washing up and rushed out to find they were buds!

Each stage of the flower's development is distinct and wonderful

and surprising: the flowers are unfurled for a day before they become purple.

i think this is a tea rose. My (nice side) next door neighbours were having their last remaining patch of earth concreted over several years ago and thoughtfully offered me their only cultivated plant. I rushed round with my spade and a bucket and rescued this lovely rose. I took these pictures at dawn last Thursday. These particular blooms have now been deadheaded but there are a few buds left on the bush.

i love Dahlias. I grow them every year from seed as i have usually slipped into a seasonal decline around the time i should be digging up and storing the bulbs. I am hoping to try and do the right thing this year, although i am a little disappointed to have had none of the big scarlet pompom blooms promised in the picture on the front of the seed packet. Nearly all of this years Dahlia are white and chrome yellow. These two are the exceptions.

When i became a gardener, my Mother told me i must grow Morning Glory and so i have done every year - sometimes a bit late, like this year, but they have obliged happily at the last minute. My friend Sally is a gardener now and i have passed on the lore.

This is a Helichrysum flower, on it's way out but fading with such grace, humility and quiet elegance - an example to us all. Snigger. But doesn't it look like a young Edwardian girl, gazing at the sun setting on the sea? Perhaps the Channel, perhaps she can hear the artillery....oh stop it.

I grew some new Astors this year. The colour hasn't transferred to screen very well, they are much mauver. I have a clump by the fish pond that i transplanted from my Grandmother's front garden when the family house was sold which are much paler and more delicate, proper Michaelmas Daisies.

The Datura are coming into their own now. I grew 10 this year, gave some away and have 5 or 6 in the garden. They deserve an entire post to themselves really. Sally alerted me to their extreme toxicity so i have a wash after hugging them now.

 These 2 little flowers are doing very well. Queenie is 5 and a half months old now! We assume NoNo is about a month older, 'though Queenie is taller all of a sudden. I'm hoping to be able to make a double appointment at the vets for their spayings so that they can get through the difficult day and convalescence together.

 

Nana will look after them. 

path of a painting

march

june 9th

July

august 29th

september 5th

september 12th

september 16th

I've had a very good couple of weeks of consistent and mostly daily  work on one painting. Instead of my usual attitude of doing a bit here and there and seeing what transpires, i have made decisions about the patterns and design on this canvas and, for the most part, stuck to them - even working on it in my sketchbook in the evenings downstairs to keep focused for the next day. The old method (which wasn't a method at all) never worked; paintings would be left for months, sometimes years, in unfinished states. There's a stack over there.
 An awful lot of claptrap is peddled about art. Especially painting and especially abstract painting. Most of the nonsense is spoken by those who can't paint but admire the ability to do so and plenty by art critics who really should know better. A mystique is created and a 'God is painting through me' element can even creep in. I am guilty of having a hierarchical scale of my own endeavors with painting at the top and embroidery, knitting, bear making and photography jostling beneath, buying, idiotically into the idea that art trumps craft.
   A painting is paint on a support. Painting is the act of putting paint on a support. That's all there is to it. And the viewer either likes it or doesn't like it.
    So in thinking and, more importantly, feeling like this, i've done more work in the last fortnight than i have for a very long time. Another reason for the tremendous Getting On With It is the thought which has developed into a certainty, that this and the plastered canvas are to be my last orb/circle paintings for a little while. I may tinker a bit on a smaller scale but i think some kind of unconscious desire has finally been satisfied. I used to rail against the orbs but an art therapist friend advised me not to, just to let them appear. In Steiner wisdom, so another friend mentioned, the circle represents a wish for wholeness.

  In Other News, I've made the first print of the Inner Ear lino cut. It needs some tidying up before i print it again. It's the first cut i've made using the new Pfeil tools and i'm thrilled to see that all the additional gouging i did to deepen the lines was unnecessary as even the light, single marks show very well.

 Ofcourse, one of the best things about any kind of art or craft is that nothing ever turns out perfectly..... so we keep going.