Doodle Garden

T'was another lovely summer day here on the Cape, temper atures in the mid-70s, not especially humid, not too windy...you know, just about right.

Today's surprise in the garden came when I discovered that this particular daylily plant appears to be a double-flowered variety, with all manner of extra petals. Pretty fancy, eh?

I couldn't resist another chance to show off the verbena bonariensis today, too, as it continue to flower quietly down by the Three Sisters Garden. In fact, it grows right beside today's daylily of note.

An interesting thing about the verbena B: it just continues to flower and the tiny purple flowers just drop off when they're through and flutter their way elsewhere into the garden below. As a result, I have, on a few occasions, thought that my eyes were detecting some new plant with minute blu-ish flowers...only to discover they were the "discards" from the towering verbena.
And now, as they say across The Pond, for something completely different.

Claire, of A Little Piece of Me, and her pal, Laura, have declared this to be Doodle Week. A whole week dedicated to celebrating the little bits of random art we make and discard all the time. When I heard that Wednesday was to be Doodle Garden day, how could I not participate?

Sadly, it only occurs to me now that I ought to have photographed some pages from my daily log and datebook at work, as I am forever drawing daisies and other flowers whilst talking on the phone to people. However, that didn't occur to me while I was actually at work today, so this will have to wait for the next go round.

However, way back when I used to be good about keeping a daily journal (we're talking the 90s here, kids), I used to do little drawings/ doodles/ random designs all the time... sometimes to seperate entries, or to initiate a new notebook ...or of course, just to procrastinate from writing about things I wasn't quite prepared to face.

Sometimes, it was a little celebration of the world around me, though. I think, if I were to look back, I'd find that my best botanicals actually happened in the winter, when I wasn't out in the thick of the garden by day and exhausted by all that at night.

So today, I thought I'd grab a few random volumes of my old journals (there are about 70) and flip through for a few bits of old Doodle (there's no rule for Doodle Week saying they have to be current, tho perhaps I'll have replaced my old dried out Crayola markers by next time!) which I might share with you to celebrate the occasion.



My "media" of choice, to get all pretentious about it, were the Crayola magic markers I mentioned before...as many different colors as I could manage. And I also had a cool little tool that allowed me to blend those markers a bit, which created the watercolor sort of effect you see in the flowers above.

Still, they were just silly little doodles and I'm happy to finally share a few of them here, where someone besides me might actually see and be amused/entertained by them.

The sunflower below is a good example of one of those winter drawings. It was done on January 27 of 2006 and the accompanying journal entry talks of a heavy snowfall that night while I was sketching.

I haven't had success with sunflowers really before this season, so this was really just one born of my wishful imagination and not based on anything I'd actually grown. But as it turns out, it's especially appropriate to include here today...


...because, while I was at work today, my tallest sunflower (about an even six feet now) opened with no fanfare or warning, to greet me with its smiling green and yellow face when I got home this evening!

This bumblebee was apparently drunk with happiness at having this whole massive flower to himself, as he didn't even think about flying away as I moved in for some pictures. He was just crawling, sort of sleepily, around the perimeter of the great flowerhead.

There's still a couple days left of Doodle Week--if you like to draw or sketch or scratch, you should check out the themes for the days remaining and get to posting!