Waders and sketchbook

Brought over in 1839 for its exquisite flowers, Himalayan Balsam is now ravaging our river banks. It grows rapidly and spreads quickly, smothering other plants as it goes. As you walk along the River Crane, you see it standing in pockets of dense thickets on either side, despite hard efforts to keep it at bay.

I am in two minds about whether to draw it. It’s a beautiful plant, growing taller than head height, with large leaves and orchid-like flowers that attract the bees. But it is the bully of the river banks, depriving smaller native plants of light, nutrients and pollinators necessary for survival. When it dies back, it leaves the river banks bare and depleted, where normally plants that flower at other times of year would be able to grow. Insects and birds that feed on these other plants also lose out.

But I think “I’ll just try and pull one up and see“. They are not usually easy to just pull up and if I manage, large leafed weeds often wilt within minutes and don’t recover. That’s been my experience with other large weeds – so disappointing!

It has vicious looking red roots…

To my surprise it comes up easily, bringing a clump of earth with it. I wade back with it in a compost sack, aware I might be spreading its seeds further afield. One plant can produce 800 seeds which, often carried by the river, go on to germinate downstream.

By the time it is in back my studio it has wilted. But I plant it in a bucket, water it and go home, hoping for the best.

The next day it has recovered completely! It just has to be drawn!

Now I feel a sense of guilt. Like my forebears, I couldn’t resist this beautiful plant!

(Though perhaps if they had just drawn it, rather than bringing it back to England, our river banks would be in a much better state!)

Looking at the plants on the river bank and thinking about which to draw, I’m reminded of a painting that I keep going back to – The Great Piece of Turf  by Albrecht Dürer, 1503, painted in watercolour and body colour.

Each blade of grass and every leaf has been meticulously painted. It has a natural composition and I imagine the whole turf was dug up and taken back to the studio to draw. I like the fact that the dandelions have finished flowering – there are no beautiful flowers here and even some of the plant roots are revealed – it seems a very truthful drawing.

There’s a debate about whether or not Dürer made up the composition as it is thought to be too good to just occur naturally. I like to think he went out looking for and dug up exactly the right composition and took it back to his studio to paint, largely unaltered. I think the clod of earth in the paintings gives a sense of the rootedness and ordinariness of the plants. The Great Piece of Turf seems very contemporary in that it preferences the plants’ natural habitat and ecology over cultural appreciation.

Dürer made many plant studies and (along with da Vinci) was an early pioneer of botanical art. Though this is probably his most famous botanical painting, Dürer painted several ‘pieces of turf’…

Celandine, watercolour and body colour*, 28.7 x 14.9cm | Columbine, watercolour and body colour*, 35.5 x 28.7cm | The Small Piece of Turf, body colour*, 40.8 x 31.5cm

• * “Body colour is the use of opaque colours for highlights or dense, flat areas. It’s a technique that has been used in watercolour for centuries. Before Designers Gouache was introduced in 1937, the only method of achieving opacity was to use white on its own, or to use it to make tints of the watercolours.” (www.winsornewton.com)

The River Crane has some great ‘pieces of turf’, where plants have rooted into soil deposited along the margins. Some of these are easy to lift up and take back to the studio.

One piece, containing a ladies thumb, an unidentified plant and a (dead) common ragwort, I took back to draw. The plants look as though they are only just surviving – and yet they are probably thriving! I have drawn them on a piece of recycled plywood, in charcoal and acrylic paint.

(Dead) common ragwort and other plants, charcoal and acrylic on plywood, 122 x 88cm