Small things

Here's one I made simply because I wanted to.  (You have to do things for the sheer joy of it every now and then or else you cut the nose off your practice.  We can talk much more about that later if you want.  Maybe in the pub.) Anyway the plant is a tiny Rhododendron lapponicum from Saana fjell.  A lovely thing, the leaves are aromatic when you stroke them,  I believe the leaves and flowers are sometimes used for tea, read a bit more about it on this nice site if you like.

The plant is protected here so no casual lopping off branches for dinner or specimens.  And as Saana is a sacred mountain you might want to be especially respectful of all its life forms anyway.  A person who wants to interview this plant here might to lie down on the fragrant mountain for an hour or two in the sunshine, patiently listening, making drawings and taking photos, trying not to trample.  You don't feel at all sorry for me for this, do you, and nor should you.

 It's about 3½ cm high as you can see ...

 or, if you like, here's a hare-shit for scale:

(Ok the bunnies are pretty big around here...

I think this is a Lepus timidus the arctic hare, with her big white feet.  I took the photo at midnight from my bedroom window.)

Here's where my rhododendron grows:

Still some snow:

I befriended this very nice mousey-type living nearby who consented to be photographed in exchange for sharing my cheese sandwich (don't worry, good black rye-bread, very healthy.)

Up here the moss grows taller than the trees

the plants huddle close to each other

the rocks appear greenish because they are covered in lichen.

It's a very nice journey to the top:

Biting and chewing

Sometimes I feel like I have bitten off more than I can chew. Lovely acacia! But so many leaflets!

 

Here's a look up through the leaves of the real thing. The deal is, the thorns are a home that the tree makes specially for its symbiotic ant-friends Pseudomyrmex ferruginea.

The warty structures on the stem of the leaf here are extrafloral nectaries, with a special recipe of nectar for the same ant species. In addition to this sugary treat the tree provides the ants with a delicious proteiny fatty snack, the Beltian body - the yellow jobs on the ends of the leaflets here. In return for this luxury hospitality the ants protect the tree from hervivores, attack any vines thet come within spritting distance of the tree and generally weed out all the competition from around the tree. If you want to see really good photos of  Pseudomyrmex ferruginea (or any other ant), have a look at Alex Wild's photography.

Here's Pat Clifford at RBGE heroically lifting slabs in a search for nodules, hardly anything at all, a bit disappointing but there were one or two which is enough to be going on with.

Herbarium heaven

This is my new favourite place to be, the herbarium at RBGE. It's like a library only it has thousands of dried plants in it. And microscopes.  And it is quiet and climate controlled.

Like many libraries, anyone can use it, all you have to do is email the nice staff and tell them what you want to look at.

Here I'm looking at an Acacia cornigera that was collected from Tobago in 1909. I'm enjoying the strange and very direct connection to the cultural histories that these dusty old labels have too.

The plan is to make a lovely Botanical Illustration of this plant....

As for the specimens themselves, I think they are magical. Rachel Pedder-Smith has lots of interesting things to say about herbarium specimens in her thesis. She considers the specimens as objects, as well as plant material subjects. I realise I am thinking of them more as sort of toenails - discarded parts of living beings - and of the human agents who use them as the sort of witches that go around gathering bits of people in order to do magic on them. Or maybe saintly relic sorts of things. Something slightly more animated with its own self rather than solely by the human interactions with it, at any rate, albeit rendered extraordinary by being seen through a special human prism. I haven't  finished thinking about that so I'll say no more for now, given the risk of deteriorating into talking Pure Balls.

sketchbook pages 1

Some bacon-and-eggs....

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.