DARTINGTON TREASURES
Just over a week ago, we had another sketching outing at Dartington. I picked up several beautiful little natural treasures and stowed them away in my bag to take home and draw. There is such beauty in these tiny fragments of nature!
I love trees
We had lunch in the shade of a large tree. It had several branches which looked dead, and which were covered with gorgeous lichen.
There were many fragments which had fallen to the ground and I was able to pick some of them up, as well as a small cluster of fallen leaves.
When we got home, I went online and discovered the Woodland Trust tree identification app which I’ve downloaded to my phone. With this, it is easy to identify different trees via a sort of multiple choice process. It turns out that this particular tree is a sessile oak (Quercus petraea). Sessile apparently means that things are joined on directly, rather than with a stem. The acorns of our famous English oak (Quercus robar) are attached to the branch with a stem, whereas the sessile oak’s acorns are directly attached with no stem. The leaves of the sessile oak are also less deeply lobed. It is a rich habitat for all kinds of creatures and often has lichen on it apparently. The sessile oak is the national tree of Ireland. Dartington has a lot of very interesting trees.
When I was a child I was able to identify a lot more stuff than I remember these days – growing up in the country, Mum was always taking us on nature walks and we knew the names of lots of trees and wild flowers. The wild flower names still delight me, such as “bird’s foot trefoil” and “Queen Anne’s lace,” “forget-me-not” and “bladder campion,” “stitchwort” and “colt’s foot” amongst others. So charming and ancient. My sister had a book called “The Countryside Companion,” given to her by our primary school headmistress, and whenever she came out with something surprisingly erudite to the adults, they would ask, “How did you know that?” and the answer was always, “It was in the Countryside Companion.” This became a family joke. The source of all wisdom! Many years later, after I was married, I obtained a copy of this wonderful book which not only contains information about our national flora and fauna, but also many country crafts. It’s very old-fashioned now, but a real treasure.
Here are the leaves of the sessile oak.
Dartington treasures
These are the little treasures I brought home from our outing. The twigs were all found under the sessile oak tree.
There seem to be a lot of feathers about at the moment. I suppose the birds are moulting now that the breeding season is coming to an end and they no longer have to be dressed in their finest to attract a lady! (They should take their old clothes to a charity shop rather than dumping them all over the countryside! – I’m glad they do, though, because they are available for me to find!)
My drawing
I have worked on this over several days, and completed it today. It is mostly coloured pencil (a combination of Faber Castell Polychromos and Amazon Basics) with the addition of a little white highlighting with Dr. Ph. Martin’s Bleed-Proof White applied with a Tombow dual brush marker blending pen, and some fine black ink work.
Off to Compton Castle again on Thursday, all being well.
