Archive
Honeysuckle days – a painting a day
click on the link to get to my Etsy shop for this painting:
http://www.etsy.com/listing/85348208/honeysuckle-showing-its-colours
There really are this many different colours in a honeysuckle flower, and yet it looks modest and subtle unlike the flowers in the photo below:
There are several things I ought to be saying but there is so much
that I really should keep to myself. This is very difficult when there is a
blog to write so I have done no blogging for a long time.
Lovely aunt has a home of her own again but there is still much to be done. She had her work
friends over to visit yesterday and took them to Ockenden Manor. There is no
point booking a Harvester for three women who have been professional caterers (
of a much higher than average standard I might add) and the Manor does a
wonderful set lunch. They had a high old time and came back to mine for coffee
in the garden. They laugh and chatter as long as they can whenever they meet it’s
wonderful to facilitate. May I grow old with such good friends.
Coming soon in the garden morning glory and the yellow lily.
Unable to avoid bragging: there were so many strawberries this year we weighed a total crop of over half a hundredweight thats fifty six pounds I believe.
size 10 in x 6 in, 26cm x 15cm
Tigridia, Ranunculous showing off in front of the origano. These are a trial planting in a pot which is what I do sometimes to work out a bedding scheme. This one is really very easy, into prepared soil plant a bag of ranunculus corms and some tigridia bulbs, allow to grow, buy sunglasses and enjoy. Buy in bulk online and this is a very economical blast of colour.
#175 a painting a day by Alison Warner on her lemon a day art blog
Honeysuckle – a painting a day
size 6 in x 6 in 15cm x 15cm pen & watercolour on heavy weight rag paper
So I finally went to town to sort out a bit of money transfer malarkey for No1 son. His grandparents wanted to move money they are saving for his illustrious future from one account to another. I discovered two things:
One: He would not be able to access his money without a passport. As he has never signed on the account before they had no comparison on the signature. My word as his mother was of no interest to them. Without a passport they tell me they would keep the money forever…..a new form of taxation? If you desperately needed your money and you were at school with no bills or anything in your name, you certainly wouldn’t be able to fork out the eighty pounds + needed for a passport.
Two: they have without a signature or any declaration started taking tax from him as though he is earning more than £6000pa (I wish) Other institutions assume that school children are non-taxpayers and send a form to fill in- in case you are liable. That seems more reasonable to me.
The best thing in the garden at the moment is a delicate Kniphofia, common name Red hot poker, mine is not as tall or chunky as some and it’s not red either; more of a luke warm poker. It is a plant from my phase of collecting apricot coloured flowers in order to have a lavender and apricot border. I struggled to make a viable bed due to the lack of a backbone species of long flowering habit. It is easy to get that in a pink purple or a white. The Kniphofias are splendid but brief ditto the apricot Irises. Apricot Diascias are small and tend to the pink end of apricot, I bought a Jacobs Ladder which said it was apricot but it was blue. I think it needs a group of really good repeat flowering apricot roses and work out from there. Mrs Oakley Fisher looks very promising. She has just produced a shoot with about ten small buds.
The honeysuckle is another linear subject so I have done it in pen and wash.
#99 a painting a day by Alison Warner on her lemon a day art blog
Scarlet honeysuckle–a painting a day
Sold size 6 in x 6 in 15cm x 15cm watercolour on heavy weight rag paper
There is a shocking dryness to the ground and there are things looking sick all over the garden. Watering becomes a bit of an obsession at a time like this. An overnight deluge would suit me just fine.
Today I have done a very quick sketch of the beautiful Dropmore Scarlet Honeysuckle. I wanted this for years having seen a beautiful example in a friends garden in Reading, the first one or two I bought died or never grew well. Now however I have a really good healthy plant which is getting bigger every year. Its not in the perfect position though as it was moved from the last garden and put in the ground hurriedly the first autumn.
All the geraniums just about are in flower now and they are a gentle delight.
I know I should list them but some are unknown.
There is Geranium procurrens which is in need of control in one place but doing a good job elsewhere trailing through shrubs. It is said to be one of the parents of G. Anne Folkard and we got it from the garden at Stourton House from Mrs Bullivant .
There is a small reliable geranium which is probably G. endressii but a cooler pink than Wargrave Pink. It came from the remains of a compost heap at the back of the garden of a flat I rented in Reading. I must have given some to a friend with a garden at some point as I know the next place I lived had no outside space at all.
I love the way good perennials interlace friends and families as they get split up and passed on. I have an Iris which I begged from my mother as I had loved it as a child. She had it from her mother who had it from either her mother or her great aunt direct. I have given a piece of it to a distant cousin who comes from the same family in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Both our mothers had visited the old house where it grew. I never saw it anywhere else until I spotted it in the Botanic Garden at Reading; it’s Iris graminae.
Today I got a punnet of strawberries and there will be at least the same again tomorrow.
Alison
#66 a painting a day by Alison Warner on her lemon a day art blog
Lemon a day 