It was overcast and rainy yesterday and it looked quite grey as we drove over the bridge to downtown. You couldn't tell where land, sea or sky met but that didn't stop the boats from enjoying the fresh breezes out to sea.
Hallo
I'm back. Where have I been you ask? Well my job kicked in full time at the garden nursery so that's where I have been all these months. "You couldn't even post once?" you ask incredulously. Nope. I would walk home and fall asleep on the couch and do it all again the next day. I haven't even surfed anyone else's sites either. I have lots of catching up to do! However, now that the busy season is over and my hours are cut back, I can get back to some sketching (and maybe a few photos for the busy days).
My co-worker brought this beetle in for me to identify. It had drowned in her glass of juice that she had left out overnight on her balcony. I couldn't find anything of interest about it on the internet save that it can do a good deal of damage to conifers when they are an infestation. I find, when looking up bugs and beetles and whatnot, if they are a destructive insect, there is no mention of interesting facts, just the general lifecycle and how to kill them. I think I'll email my bugfriend and see if he knows why the antenna are shaped the way they are and why it has such a dense amount of hair on its underside.
High +23 although with humidity, felt like +29
Low + 15
Mason Bees
I finally bought a mason bee house. Not that I needed to. I don't have a real need to pollinate plants in the garden as the only fruit tree present is the pear tree in the front garden and I'm sure it has been doing fine without my interference. Similarily, I'm sure the mason bees are living just fine in their own wild habitat and don't need a house in which to live. Having said that, it's just nice to look at the window and say, "hallo bees". These native Mason bees are beautiful, shiny blue-black bees that don't sting because they are solitary bees. They pollinate plants and do not produce honey. I'll write more about them later when this stupid head cold leaves.
sunny and coldish
high 5
low -4
sunrise: 7:04
sunset: 5:47
Wooden Secrets
Stanley Park is a very beautiful park and juts out into the water. It is filled with cedars and ferns and around the perimeter is a seawall that you can walk the full length of eight kilometers. Many tourists come and go, especially in the summer as it is very accessible from downtown. There is the touristy area with carved totem poles and gift shops, kiddie pools and the aquarium but there are also more remote areas with secrets in the woods. This wooden carving is one of them. I walked in this park for two years, nearly everyday and never saw it until one day a fellow asked if I had seen the mask carved into the cedar stump. I don't know who carved it or when. It stands about five feet high and it really is something to see, settled in the shadowy forest with its topknot of salmonberry bushes growing out of its head.
Worms
I've been reading about earthworms the past few days. I did not know that there were GIANT earthworms. In the Palouse region of Washington State, there can be found a giant earthworm, or, I should say, they found a giant earthworm, as one hasn't been seen in over twenty years. They are pinkish white, reach two feet or so and excrete a milky white fluid that smells like lilies. Huh. Who knew? Not me.
I did know that earthworms had amazing regenerative abilities, in that when a worm has been severed, perhaps by a shovel, it can regrow its missing segments. I didn't know that if two earthworms were sutured together, side-by-side, by enthusiastic researchers, they could grow together and function normally.
I also didn't know that earthworms could absorb high accumulations of PCBs, without apparent harmful effects to the worm ( yes, the robin dies but why doesn't the worm?) and where there are earthworms, PCBs in the soil break down.
Worms also have enough sense, when bringing leaves down into their burrows, to turn the leaf the right way round, so the narrow end, with the stem, gets dragged in first.
So hurray for worms.
Yep, I realize that this isn't an earthworm but it's what I saw when I was coming back on the ferry today.
She Sells Seashells By The Seashore
So I need to mention it was sunny Tuesday just. I need to mention it because it has been raining so much that even my mother, who is visiting from England, exclaimed that, "she had never seen the like". So there you go. It was so warmish and sunny, we went for a walk around Stanley Park ( about 2 hrs) and sat on the beach and sketched for an hour. We were visited by a few gulls... Thayer's Gull and a Ring-billed Gull (so thinks my mum). They posed for us in hopes of something to eat but we were stingy sketchers and they didn't get anything for their poses. Besides, they wouldn't stay still.
A few shells... Dark Mahogany Clam or Varnished Clam and Pacific Blue Mussels.
Ferny Friends
Here's another green pal of mine. The Deer Fern, or <i> Blechnum Spicant</i>. It wasn't until I drew it that it sank in what the guidebooks say about it; only some of the fronds hold the spores, not all of them. So here's me, drawing the fronds thinking, "Well, funny, there are no spores on the underneath of this frond. How odd for a fern." (Insert noise of cattleprod here).
Sometimes you just don't know something until you draw it. Scratch that, most times....no possibly ALL of the time. You don't see until you draw. Well, for me anyway.
Salal
I think it's time to feature a few green locals who take centre stage in the West Coast flora. The first is Gaultharia Shallon or Salal. Salal grows in abundance here. It is an evergreen shrub whose habit can be from creeping along the ground to growing into a shrub of six feet, depending on conditions. It has a nice glossy leaf and blooms flowers that resemble small lanterns. In the summer it bears dark berries that are edible. It's a pretty sturdy little plant and can often survive diverse conditions, which is why one sees it tag-teaming with bark mulch in parking lot medians. There it grows stunted and ill in the open sun and makes me grit my teeth. WHY DON'T YOU JUST STICK A STAKE THROUGH ITS HEART? (Cough. Rearrange glasses, tuck shirt back in.) It is much nicer to see it growing all bouncy and lush as an understory growth.
Squirrels And Hellebores
It turned out to be a sunny day and it was very nice to see the snowy mountains peeking through gaps in the cloud. The grey squirrels are doing their courting chases up and down the trees. They wind round and round up the trunk, take a flying leap to another tree and wind all the way down, only to run like mad across the grass to another trunk and do it all again. Our grey squirrels are actually from the east as they were introduced in the early 1900's. They are <i>Sciurus carolinensis</i>, and apparently the Latin word for squirrel, <i>sciurus</i>, is derived from two Greek words, skia, meaning shadow, and oura, meaning tail. So loosely, a squirrel is one that sits in the shadow of its own tail, which is very apt. There are two more kinds of squirrel here, the nocturnal flying squirrel and the Douglas squirrel who is a fiesty little character who hangs out in the conifer areas of BC. There was some worry that the grey squirrels would oust the Douglas squirrels but the two species apparently don't really overlap in habitat so resources can be divided. (You know, the more you look at the word 'squirrel', the more bizarre it becomes. I hate it when words do that.) And why am I talking about squirrels? I meant to mention that the hellebores are already blooming, a little earlier than last year, just a little.
Some Ducks
Look, look what pressure does! It's a double-edged sword it is. Watercolour is a stern mistress.