The world turned upside down

Most people's roots grow in a downwardly direction as ane fule kno. Delightful phenomenon of the week is the upwards-growing or negatively gravitrophic rootlet that grows out of the nodules that our good friend Myrica gale (bog myrtle) makes on its roots in collaboration with mutual friends Frankia bacteria.

This happens when the oxygen concentration in the soil is very low, which is often for the Myrica gale, which likes to live in stagnant bogs. Frankia like a bit of oxygen for their business purposes and so they make the lobes of lots of the nodules send rootlets up to the surface, like snorkels. Marvellous.

Little cone

Here's a study of a female fruit of the lovely bog myrtle or Myrica gale.

It's a great big enlargement, the real thing is about 8mm long. Whenever I look at anything under a microscope, it suddenly looks incredibly tasty and delicious. You get a better idea of how juicy everything alive is. A delightful thing about such reproductive structures as this is that they are often somehow disturbingly sexy as well. All that thrusting and jutting and other adjectives ripped straight from the Mills & Boon. It's something I hope to get across in a subtle way, in a sort of "While I'm here I might just add that Nature's a Bit Of A Good Time Girl, don't you know..." sort of way.

Anyway this is a nice enough picture but it isn't of Much Use To Science - it's not schematic enough, and you can't tell at a glance that the cone is made up of  a spiral arrangement of three-pronged  prongy things. Too much of the higgledy-piggledy 'well I just grew where I could and how I could under the circumstances' individualism and not enough of the 'this is how I work' generalisation. So it's perfectly good Natural History but rubbish Botany. That's the sort of conversation between me, my making, a plant and Culture that I find endlessly fascinating. How will it affect what I do next? How will it affect how I see others' work?

Fellow paint-nerds will be interested to hear that I used both the familiar and much-loved Greengold (W&N) but also the marvellous Nickel Azo Yellow by Daniel Smith to get those cheerful acid lime greens and yellows. And the biggest fattest brushes I could fit into the corners.

bog myrtle

 Owen and I went to Rannoch Moor to intrepidly hunt my bog myrtle. It's a fabulous place,  a complex blanket bog, a transition mire and a quaking bog.

What you don't really get an idea of from photos is exactly how boggy a bog is when you get there. You can't walk across this stuff, you have to leap gracefully from tussock to tussock and if you miss you're up to your neck in it.

And that's exactly what the Myrica gale loves. Apparently the more it sits in the stagnant water, the more it nodulates with its bacterial friends.

Bog myrtle has Frankia friends, like the Alnus glutinosa, and look! Here they are together having a nice time, I don't know if they are sharing their bacteria, I suspect they are, and who could blame them.

So how do you go about making a lovely botanical illustration of this beautiful and useful and fragrant plant?  I'm not absolutely convinced I've got the foggiest about that but for starters here are some sketches and drawings and nice conversations I've had with the plant.