Birdfoot Trefoil

This is one of my favourite type of sketches - the scientific(ish) botanical.

I have done a lot of these. A couple summers ago, I had a personal challenge ... one flowering botanical a day for two weeks (but went on for about a month). Had to be a different flower and within 500 meters of my house. You would NOT BELIEVE the number of flowering plants that are so close to home. Once you start looking, you can't help but see them. Funny ... now on my long runs, when I see something new and interesting, I have a sudden urge to stop and take a sample home with me. Sadly, I have no where to store them and so have to keep going. A part of me dies when I have to leave one behind.

Having said that, doing this project has developed my eye for seeing and I can now quite accurately remember very small details that will allow me to find other examples of the same flower later when I have the time to sketch. Many of the wildflowers are small (less than 10 mm) in size, so a sketch involves some close up work to really see what the flower is all about. There are often micro dots of colour, lines, curves, edges, fluorishes, thin curlicues, anthers, stamens and all manner of beauty to behold. More deep-sea diving once you start looking ... a whole new world opens up.

Fine detail brings me to my next point. This is actually the THIRD botanical I have done since I started drawing again. The other two were done with a pen that has too thick a nib for the subject matter. Screwed it up and the sketches are quite leaden. Nuts. Nib thickness is key for being able to capture the sense of delicacy. Super fine lines also lets the deliniation fall to the background while the colour and form come to the front.

Another thing I love about botanicals is discovering the nomenclature. Everything has a name and there is a name for everything. I have Peterson's Guide to Wildflowers and that is key to the accurate identification. I often think that I am putting together my own super-local version of this guide. It gives me an idea for a fun gift ... a handmade, illustrated local guide to flowering plants. I could never give up the originals but I have a fine scanner and some wicked paper ...

This one is called Birdfoot Trefoil (Lotus corniculatus). Birdfoot (because it looks like one in one of the growth stages ... second from left bottom). Trefoil because it has three (tre) leaves (foil). I failed to capture the latin on the sketch and will add later.

One of the best names so far is the first page of my current sketchbook ... Viper's Bugloss (oddly, a delicate purple flower). Seriously ... who comes UP with these names? Very entertaining. I guess that's a hazard of descriptive biology. Eventually you run out of good names and then one night, you and your botony buddies get roaring drunk one night and start making ridiculous word associations that probably made sense at the time but now is rather cryptic but too bad, the name sticks.

When I do these sketches, I often think of the heyday of descriptive biology and think how wonderful it must have been to have that kind of job. The scientists and the independently wealthy (sometimes one and the same) spent their time just looking for new things and then cataloguing them. What a *great* time that must have been.