Plant Drawing Therapy

THE SOFT shadows on the white wall interest me as much as the sharp outlines of the fronds of this potted palm in a waiting area at the Fountain Medical Centre, Morley. The Centre offers a range of healing therapies, mainstream and alternative. Perhaps I should offer my services as a practitioner of plant drawing therapy.

It’s a pleasant way to spend an hour or more waiting.

A Tagine at Ikea

At the restaurant at Ikea, after sweet potato and chick-pea tagine with couscous, which I’d definitely have again, I sat for 20 minutes or so with a mug of English Garden tea and drew the birches and hawthorns growing along the top edge of the adjacent motorway cutting.

A magpie flew across at treetop level. There were two large bowl-shaped twiggy nests visible in the bare upper branches which looked like half-finished magpie nests but this is the high, exposed ground between the Aire and Calder valleys which gets the full force of any winds from the west coming in over the Pennines. Perhaps they were half-wrecked nests.