Looking at my garden with a drawing eye, I’ve learned to appreciate the plants that pop in unplanned.
This season, fennel I thought was no more is springing up all over the place, adding its feathery texture to the sweet peas and verbena. It’s home to wildlife too: it was a tiny turquoise-striped caterpillar that had me drawing the fennel and as I drew, an even smaller brick red spider joined us. Alpine strawberries are throwing in runners among the tomato plants, tiny lime leaves and red-green threads singing out from the grey-green.
And on the shelves (a vertical cloche that lost its cover) grow peas, parsley, chillis… and needing a double take, a full pot of clover. In my country childhood, one of the local farmers would plant one field a year with clover, to put the goodness back into the soil. So that small pot is, I’ve decided, my own little fallow field in the city.
Biro, watercolour, fineliner, on waste paper.