What's Blooming This Week

The garden has just exploded this week after all the rain. It's been cool up to now and some things have been delayed. I'm having trouble keeping up with what's blooming this week. I started this on the weekend and by today three more things have started blooming. These are the daylilies, the Japanese painted daisy, the Siberian daisy and the perennial Geranium. The Siberian daisy has the oddest, almost unpleasant smell, not one you would associate with flowers at all. I'm having a hard time being very close to those daisies, but the bees sure seem to like them. They get so loaded down with pollen that they fly rather drunkenly around in almost slow motion.

Garden Grids

I had been journalling for a while, but two years ago I decided I wanted to add illustrations to my journals. I wasn't sure how to start as I wasn't very accomplished at drawing. My garden is where I spend a good part of every summer day so I decided to start there. Surely the flowers wouldn't mind if their portraits were a bit wonky, surely they wouldn't whine that it didn't really look like them. Once a week, I would sit on my deck and draw each of the flowers that were blooming. Since I planted many containers, this soon became overwhelming, so I focused only on the perennials. This weekend, I noticed that it was time to start this tradition again as there were currently six perennials blooming. Six! That would make a perfect grid drawing! This is the result. It is done in the Aquabee sketchbook with my fairly new Caran d'Ache watercolor pencils. They are buttery and rich and smooth and I liked the result so much that I didn't even add any water. My previous attempts had been with markers and with colored pencils.

This one on the left is from June 2006. This one on the right is from June 2005.

It's gratifying to see that there has been some improvement. Certainly using better materials and daily practising makes all the difference.