Japanese Maple Make-Over

Here's a "before-and-after" if I ever saw one...

Exhibit A: new-to-me garden, mature weeping Japanese Maple with lots of accumulated dead wood.

This is the easiest and most gratifying pruning job ever: stick your arms into the birdsnest, and gently wave them around. Tinder-dry deadwood will snap off live branches like popcorn.


I only used my saw to remove larger dead branches, and fine-tuned dead twigs by hand. And Voila...

Japanese Maples should look good year-round; they are naturally elegant with a little TLC. I didn't prune any live/green wood, as this isn't the best time of year for that, with all nature's forces rushing to life. Pruning at this time of year tends to stimulate new growth, and I don't want any zealous wing-y branches launching into the stratosphere, so will touch up (if necessary) in the summer slow-down.

Happy Spring!

whoot ! whoot ! (a crocus shot from yesterday's sunshine)


Here's the next BIG NEST painting...hmm I think I know why I felt like painting nests.

Please don't copy this and make a million bucks. Or, if you do, share with me. Actually, the camera's on a low-quality setting, so you can't. Ha.

Big Nest II (28" x 34", acrylic on canvas)

A very wet n' dreary first day of spring, but I was nevertheless out and about, covered in mud. The mailman was wearing shorts (optimistically) and we shared a wail over the weather.

Spring Countdown...

The calls are comin' in...and the Harley/Scooter/Bicycle-Gardener rides again. (I know, it's getting complicated.)


Little Lungworts luring the Hummingbirds north in Daphne's garden...(Lungwort is also known as Pulmonaria--so lets agree to call it that from now on.)
It's amazing the difference a week makes! Granted, the previous snowy entry was from a last-weekend-of-semi-hibernation trip up to the Shuswap (400 km northeast) for a gathering of the clan. Still snow up there, but warm, with birds singing, and enough thaw for my niece to make mud pies in the snow banks while I chopped wood. The birds weren't singing here until this past weekend either.


So, winter pruning is finished in most gardens and I'm moving on to general clean-ups/soil amending/perennial dividing/transplanting/new plantings etc. etc.! Hmm. Suddenly I feel busy...

How wonderful that the world is blooming again. Sending some of this good energy to places in the world that need it...Japan...Libya...

2 days to Spring!

A Little Spring Advance...

Hallelujah Helleborus! (Never thought I'd see "hallelujah" and "hell" in the same sentence.) A chorus of Helleborus in Sue and Hugh's garden, in a rare and revitalizing sunshower this week. Soak up your Vitamin D while you can!

Here's some more medicine for your eyeballs: crocus! crocus! crocus! (I've gone a little mad but there is hope.)



This garden is very sea-level and southern-exposed, so is farther ahead than the mountain-side perches of us valley/treeline dwellers. It's nice to lose elevation and gain some sanity when there's a break in the weather.

I'm posting the following pics of a Cornus mas/Corneliancherry Dogwood because I've noticed in the past few years that these are prolific fruiting trees--edible too. They bear a multitude of small oblong red drupes that everyone seems to ignore.

However, thanks to my googling skills, I learn that they taste like a cross between cranberry and sourcherry, and are therefore used for syrups/jams, and various beverages in Eastern European and Middle Eastern countries. Also of note, Corneliancherries are not fully ripe and flavourful until they drop, which makes foraging a little difficult. Unless you lay a tarp under a tree and shake it...? I wonder if North Vancouverites could find them, dried and salted, in local Persian food stores?

Anyways, if you see a tree around like this, go back and visit it in mid-July and see for yourself!

Still Raining, Still Painting (on International Women's Day)

Here's the big version of my nest study. Nest I.

Nest II coming up.

My sister has been appointed as Marketing Director. Her birthday is on International Women's Day (not a prerequisite, but still). I had to explain the genesis of the nest theme.

I said, "Hmm, I just liked that nest rock."

This one.

But nests are incredibly symbolic. I say "I just like painting what I feel like painting. It's like accessing the subconscious/unconscious world. Sometimes I don't understand a painting until years later." Like this one.

Acrylic on hardboard, currently covering the breaker-box by the kitchen stove.

I did this oh...1999? Right after travelling to England, where I met a woman named Trish who had just been diagnosed with breast cancer. I did this as a "healing painting" to help her change and transform (spiderweb/butterfly...) and overcome her illness. Waaay back then, I didn't have technology, so I took a photograph and mailed it to her in the post. (She did recover, and got married.)

Later, I changed the face in the painting (it had been a portrait) to a more stylized "everywoman" face. Later still, I wondered why the windows are so dark, both the house and fence are so monochromatic, the pickets almost look like bars, and the colourful garden is outside the fence.

If I were to analyze it now, with the clarity of years, I'd say "the little house with the picket fence" represented a restrictive life/body/mindset that needed shaking up. The woman is actually pointing to a spider, hidden in the foliage, a classic agent of the creation/destruction process (continually weaving webs that are continually destroyed).

So the moral is, don't squish spiders.

And Yay for International Women's Day. Gratitude for living in a place where we have freedom to be, evolve, express, create, transform etc. etc. and just be ourselves. And cheers to men, who also have to evolve, express, create and transform themselves. We are all in this together, becoming more human in the best sense.

More Random Art-ifacts of an Off-Season Painter

Welcome back to my studio, also known as the "window nook." Considerably more comfortable, if less roomy, than the Palm Nut Studio (which started this whole blogging habit).

I'd say I'm generally a conflicted artist/painter: I have a life-long desire to work/play with colour and form and paint and tangible materials, coupled with a basic inability to be indoors on a nice day (thus, the gardening habit). For instance, right now, the sun has come out and I have every intention of riding my bike through the remaining snow banks so I can go get more...paint (or anything).

Desertsong

However, when I do sit down and paint, it can be so thrilling...to find forms and effects that almost seem to happen like magic, or even to be there already...

Can you see the face?

Like so...

...and so...

Muse-ic

It's also a luxury at this time of year to have the time to follow trains of thought and inspiration--I even took a "Brush-Stroke Bootcamp" course at Emily Carr (art school), which was my first bona fide painting class ever! What a revelation. In the first class, I discovered at least 10 bad habits I'd developed working on my own, and about 10 tips for methods/techniques/materials that would make my painting "flow" a little easier.

So even though I still love the works I did (like the one below) in the past, I have aspirations to work faster, in a series, playing more with colour and paint.

(Havana Yemaya, below, is a composite painting from photos taken when my choir travelled to Cuba in 2005)

So here's a new trail of paint to follow...inspired by this Bird'snest stone...

Colour studies for large works on canvas, comin' up!

Wish me luck!