Lemon a day

   size 6 in x 4.5 in 15cm x 12cm watercolour on heavy weight rag paper

The day started groggy and foggy, the fog was outside the groggy was in me.

I don’t think the smell of plumbing solder agrees with me for one thing.

The installation of a better radiator in this room has meant that some of the junk has been moved out the way which is nice and I have a better view into the side garden. This is the time of year for that patch as it had masses of Sedum ‘Autumn Glory’, which is a very simple undemanding plant but it peaks quietly now when lots of other stuff is heading for Tatty Town. There is also a large shaggy white dahlia which survived the winter in the ground; it’s remarkable what did survive, in fact I am almost sure that I have lost more things to the drought this year than to the hard frost in January.

I spent the morning collecting apples from the trees in the community orchard to identify. There are an awful lot more trees there than seemed possible when the undergrowth of nettles and brambles was untamed. An old pear is dripping with hard green fruit and there are some trees that have shed their crop. We found what we thought must be there, a Cox, almost hidden under ash trees which have grown up in the area since the orchard was abandoned, it has barely fruited. I think there is a D’Arcy Spice apple and a Reverend Wilkes (named for the horticultural stalwart who bred the Shirley poppy, see earlier blogs). There is also honey fungus fruiting on the roots of several trees which is very bad news indeed.

We went for a different walk today, if we had been there a couple of days ago there had been some very fine ceps, as it was they were huge and home to millions of tiny maggots.. In fact on the way back from the community orchard I saw a cep by the pavement only a few minutes walk from here. They really are everywhere. Instead of edible fungi we picked paintable fungi and here is my first effort. I don’t think I have drawn one of these since I was at school. Amanita’s are classics of the fungi world, tall, well formed and successful they are in the main poisonous or very dubious, some will kill you, this could make you pretty ill with the possibility of some hallucinations depending on the weather…..the suggestion is that the toxin/hallucinogen varies in strength according to the type of year it has been.

#131 a painting a day by Alison Warner on her lemon a day art blog

Fly Agarics in Ashdown Forest