28 April finds me checking the Canada Plums behind Pipers House in Bishops Mills, the day after our snow storm. The petals that had looked like damp tissue paper, peeking out from under big pillows of heavy wet snow are all dry and intact now, every flower accounted for, and light green leaves edged with burnt sienna are opening at the tips of the twigs. The grass below their overhanging boughs is embroidered lavishly with purple-flowered Gill-over-the-ground, and Dandelions complement the purple with bright yellow pompoms.
Spring has certainly bounced back from the surprise snow day. The Violets are in full blossom, having untangled their long flower stems and rearranged their leaves since yesterday. These are a European violet, with large white and purple blossoms, and the patch grows larger every year. The Honesty which was bowed down by snow are all up straight now, most with deep magenta 4-petalled flowers, and some with white. Black flies hover in front of my glasses and crawl behind my ears, biting painlessly.
27 April finds us waking to large flakes of snow falling thickly all over our green spring landscape. By 09:00 there are 4 or 5 centimetres of heavy snow on the ground and large clumps of it clinging to twigs and branches. Along the path beneath the Manitoba Maples behind our house, I find blobs of wet snow bowing the newly opened magenta blossoms of the Honesty right to the ground, and the large patch of white and purple Violets are all touselled and untidy, having been pelted from above by lumps of wet snow falling from the trees. Flowers in chaos with incursions of white – a great subject for watercolour!
It continues to snow all day, so I take my subject indoors via digital photograph, and keep a fire going in the cookstove as I paint my watercolour by the kitchen window.
26 April finds me checking out the patch of Ostrich Fern fiddleheads at the bridge on Actons Corners Road, east of Burritts Rapids, Ontario. I made my way down the wooded bank, through the muck left from the spring flooding, and onto the creekside flats, skirting the prickly arching canes of Raspberry and watching for last year’s Ostrich Fern fertile fronds, tall, narrow blackish clubs that always flag a fiddlehead patch. At first I thought that I was too early, that I would find no green knobs curling up from their shaggy nests in the crowns of the raised cones that are their old accumulation of each year’s leaf bases. I stepped on a few of these firm lumps, hidden under dry frond stems and sprouting Nettles, lurched to regain my footing, winced, and apologized to the ferns in case I’d damaged their embryonic fiddleheads.
Nothing showing fern green until I finally spot one. I squat down to examine it to see if I can find a good composition, and once I get down to fiddlehead level, there’s another one, right next to it, and over to the right, another – a cluster of tightly coiled fronds just beginning to shrug off their copper-coloured flakey blankets. It’s certainly too early to harvest, but I’ve found what I came to paint!
I settle down into my low stool and paint very fast, starting with a medium-dark, bluish purple underpainting. As the sun sets, a Leopard Frog growls in the bend of the creek nearby. Later, a Spring Peeper calls (next time I’ll bring a watch so I can record times), and as I pack up with the last light, I hear a distant chorus of Toads.
23 April finds us on a seldom-used but well-paved stretch of Breezy Heights Road, by the big quarry south of Antrim Ontario. A thriving population of the introduced snail Xerolenta leaves its empty shells littered so abundantly in the roadside ditch and on the dry lichened and mosssy ground between sprawling Juniper bushes, that the shells appear to be a part of the gravel substrate.
We first learned of Xerolenta obvia (then Helicella obvia) when Wayne Grimm and Glen Wiggins published an account of a colony in Bethany, Ontario. In the 1990s we made some efforts to map the limits of this colony along roads and railways around Bethany.
This fall, we learned from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (for whom we produced the book on introduced land snails and slugs in Canada) that the species had been found along Breezy Heights Road, near Antrim, and afternoon we headed out from Ottawa, so that I could see this spectacle, and we could map some of the limits of this colony.
Fred has set himself the task of seeing how extensive the colony is in the quarry, and as soon as I am settled to paint, he was over the roadside berm and into the quarry, first crossing a gravel flat where the Xerolenta shells were present in greater abundance than anywhere on the roadside, and then down steps of bedrock to the lowest level of the quarry and out onto tongues of “over burden” (soil and stumps) that had been bulldozed into the surrounding Cedar forests. Here there were few or no Xerolenta, and he found that the shells thinned out or disappeared when ever he got off the open quarry and into forest or solidly vegetated sod. So the snails inhabit the entire 600m quarry, back to its SW border at the forest — especially where the vegetation is scattered Knapweed plants. In November Fred and Robert had found shells along 1.4 km of Breezy Heights Road, so the SW margin remains to be determined in the trailer park to the northwest, and the residences to the southeast of the quarry.
It’s along roads that the open habitat the Xerolenta use is artificially created, and there’s no telling how they’ll stread along the eastern Ontario Road network.
22 April finds me admiring the four “crones” in an old pasture north of Brockville on North Augusta Road. In winter their gestures appear stark and grotesque, but as each spring coaxes the little leaves from their twigs they look to be dancing. This one, with a gaping hole near the top of the broken main trunk seems to me to be singing.
I’ve been contemplating these Sugar Maples for thirty years as subjects for painting, and I’m happy to be finally getting around to it. The trees are more ancient, and perhaps more nutrient-stressed, than they were, and it seems Cattle aren’t pastured in this field any more. The one spreading tree, the northern neighbour of the one that I am painting, looks like it once may have been attractive for Cattle to rest under. It is more flourishing than the others, but there’s such a dense growth of invasive Cathartic Buckthorn (Rhamnus cathartica) growing up among its lower branches, that Cattle couldn’t rest there now. We know that the Buckthorn is moderately palatable to Rabbits and Goats, but we don’t know what Cattle think of it.
Sugar Maples are trees of the climax forest, which demand high nutrient levels for successful growth and survival. The acid rain Sugar Maple Decline crisis in Quebec was remedied by fertilizing the sugar bushes. In a pasture, the dynamics of nutrient flow depend on the behaviour of the livestock. If they come to lie in the shade of a tree, their manure will concentrate nutrients from the open field in its vicinity, leading to flourishing growth, but if they graze under the tree, and defecate elsewhere, they may strip the nutrients away from the tree and leave it in a stressed and declining condition. There is some Buckthorn at the base of my singing Maple as well, but not as much. Also singing are Robins and Redwing Blackbirds.
I have chosen a middle-tone of burnt sienna as my underpainting, because I want its lively, cheerful influence to suffuse the painting with spring warmth.
For sale at Burlington Art Centre $425 framed
21 April finds me in the village of Mountain, Ontario, driving back from the organic grain mill on Pepperville Road. It’s about 16:00. All afternoon I’ve been admiring the soft spring colours of new foliage on the trees, and the vivid green of the new grass. The landscape is so soft and bright! On the west side of County Road #1 in Mountain I slowed to soak up this pastoral scene with cows and their calves grazing at the back of a pasture, and distant forest hazed by tree flowers and new leaf.
Several large black birds forage in the watery, grassy ditch beside my van – Common Grackles with brilliant blue and green iridescence around their upper breasts. One flies to the paige-wire fence, balancing for a moment and casting a startling white eye at me as it twiddles the long whisp of dry yellow grass in its sharp black beak. I can tell it feels special, that it is on an important errand. Before I can reach for my camera it is gone, leaving the others pecking in the ditch.
20 April finds me in the Cooks’ sugarbush, west of Bishops Mills Ontario, trying to decide which of the hundreds of blooming Trout Lilies to paint. The potential compositions are thick on the ground here, among fallen Maple leaves, fallen branches, wrinkle-barked trunks, and mossy patches. I followed a Honey Bee from flower to flower with my camera, resulting in one blurry photo that had focused past the subject.
I’m settled down to paint this Trout Lily at 17:30, and it’s a good thing I began with the blossom – because by 18:00 it is closing early for the night, along with all of the other Trout Lilies as far as I can see across the forest floor. A great tall old snag rears its ghost-like profile vaguely above the delicate green mist of opening leaves, and looking higher I notice the moon curving pale in the baby blue sky.
A Gray Tree Frog calls a few times at 18:10, and a Barred Owl hoots “Who cooks for you-all” from the swampy Cedar woods to the west at 18:35, answered right away from the north by another with a voice a couple of tones higher. They call back and forth a few times, and then fall silent, leaving evening song to the Robins.
I painted very comfortably here until 20:00, with no need for the extra sweater I brought, and no mosquito bites.
19 April finds us admiring Coltsfoot in bloom on the steep bank of the dugout pond on the farm of our neighbours, the Scott family. Matt Scott sat above me and watches the progress of today’s painting, as I sit against the trunk of the Manitoba Maple with my canvas propped in the folding stool at my knees.
I’m fascinated with the reflection of the trunks of the bushes that overhang the water, and the aquatic moss that covers the submerged trunks like heavy shaggy sleeves. The bank itself, which would be shaded by the Manitoba Maple in summer, is littered with curled, dry leaves over bare clay. Down near the edge the Coltsfoot, which will leaf out later, is sending up single yellow blooms on velvety pale stems. As the afternoon aged, the flowers closed up to rest for the night.
Viewed from an unusual angle, this scene presents a challenge, especially as the sun peeked in and out among the clouds, the reflections changed and the bottom became more and less visible by turns.
Fred wrote:
This afternoon we took Marigold the Dog to see her boyfriend, at Scott’s Lilliput Farm (they ran constantly and performed, using a raft and a boy, antics that would have gone viral on u-tube if we’d only had a video camera), and Aleta did her daily painting.
Just before we left home we heard a couple of calls from a Grey Treefrog, ushering in the late spring, with the stuttering quality one hears early in their season, presumably before the vocal cords have been stretched.
Then at Scotts, Aleta painted Tussalago (Coltsfoot), a memento of the early spring, in bloom on a north-facing bank of the clay spoil piles that were excavated when Scotts dug their irrigation pond in 1995. Now the piles are completely vegetated (mostly Phalaris arundinacea, Reed Canary Grass), and on these north-facing slopes it’s Tussalago. The bank painted is under a spreading, surprisingly large Manitoba Maple, which has grown 2 trunks of about 23 cm diameter since germinating no earlier than 1995, 2 metres up on the steep slope of the spoil pile.
There’s now no sign of the fossil Champlain Sea mini-clams, Hiatella and Macoma, that littered the clay when the pond was first excavated, and we didn’t find any shells of land snails, either. The granular clay and the litter layer of Manitoba Maple leaves looked ideal for snails, but probably suitable colonists haven’t arrived across the soggy surrounding open fields. The ground under the tree was sparsely colonized by seedlings of Red Osier Dogwood and Cathartic Buckthorn, so probably the next stage in the vegetation of the site will be a struggle between the alien Rhamnus and the native Cornus.
The water was dimpled by the movements of little fish, probably Chrosomus dace, and Sticklebacks, but we didn’t see any frogs all afternoon. In most years Leopard Frogs hibernate here in large numbers, but this year they must have gotten away to the breeding marshes before Phillip Scott and I circumperambuted the pond on the 3rd of April, seeing only 1 Leopard Frog, 1 Green Frog, and 1 Wood Frog. We did see a large numbers of shells of Helisoma campanulatum (Bellmouth Ramshorn Snail), which seem to have colonized the pond in the past few years.
Intermittent Peeper choruses wafted in from various directions, with the winnowing of Snipe and calling flocks of Geese, until at dusk, as Aleta finished the painting, the Peeper choruses became continuous, and were joined by a few Toads and the peenting of Woodcock, one of them very close to the Scotts house.
16 April finds me out between rain showers, behind the Canada Plum thicket at our place in Bishops Mills, examining the flower buds in search of candidates for a painting. They rise in loose clusters of three or four, each on a longish petiole, and all tightly clenched like pale babys’ fists emerging from scalloped reddish cuffs. As I was moving along the bushes, pulling down branch-tips to see the buds close up, I glanced down to adjust my footing, and my eye caught a wink of intense purple among the new blades of grass where we mowed the lawn near the tent last summer. Ahah! I have found the next-to-bloom wildflower (after our early Dandelion) – Gill-over-the-ground!
This has been a very demanding painting, as Gill-over-the-ground turns out to be jam-packed with details! I didn’t want to do it without the running stem, as it is so much a part of the character of the plant, running “over-the-ground”. Notice that the stem is square, giving away that it is a mint. We use it in our wild spring salads, for colour as well as its bitter minty flavour.
15 April finds me watching the Nuthatches climbing around on the Red Maple branches from my computer station at the upstairs window. Their presence is a blessing for the tree. I wonder if their movements in foraging, the scratchy little claws, and the pecking and prying and poking, is felt by the tree just as the attentions of a Cowbird hunting for ticks is soothing to the cattlebeast.
I’ve also been noting, from day to day, the expanding of the Red Maple’s flowers from little bright red knobs to pompoms, to tassels. Now on all but the lowest flowers, the leaf buds are emerging like pale green candle flames at the top of each tassel. I shouldn’t wait any longer to paint the flowers, or they’ll all be finished. Fred has broken off a twig from a reachable branch, at my request for tree flowers to paint. In this one, the leaf bud is still closed tightly within its glossy brown scales.
I am doing all the watercolours of my daily painting series on the same paper, Cotman watercolour postcards. The paper is easy to work on for landscapes as it is a good weight, and takes the washes nicely. Although it takes some effort to compensate for the ripple of its surface in detailed botanical sketches, the colour lifts off easily with a wet brush tip – so it’s a trade-off. The texture does makes hand-lettering by brush very hard to do, but overall, it passes the test and will remain my standard paper for the miniature watercolours.
