Country Gardens on the West Coast

The traditional style of a country garden is always bountiful, colourful and planted informally!

This was originally written by Christopher Lloyd in his book "The Cottage Garden" and further promoted by Gillian Rattray in a lovely South African book "In a Country Garden" which is illustrated in watercolours.

I painted two West Coast homes of neighbours last year, both homes which showed a profusion of foliage that is in harmony with the fynbos that surrounds the plots. Many indigenous plants are available at nurseries, so one can easily incorporate them. This is a wise decision as such plants are waterwise and can withstand periods of drought. Examples of such plants are the bright red Watsonia coccinea, white Zantedescia aethiopica (calla or arum lily) and lovely orange Salvia lanceolata.

Gardeners of course, also use artistic licence, so we love to incorporate lavender and daisies into our gardens and other natural looking plants that will blend in and not spread into the fynbos, as you will notice in my paintings!

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It is good to be back!

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Every year our beloved West Coast seems to get more and more popular. The R27 can become so congested that it is hard to get onto that road when we need to. Locals just burrow in and stay put, but we decided to go away this year. So 5000km by car, many sights in this lovely country, and many visits and adventures later, I am back! I enjoyed the Waterberg area tremendously and that is where I got bitten by a tick! (News travel fast and I sincerely thank everybody who wished me a speedy recovery from the tick-bite fever!) We also visited Johannesburg, Pretoria, Bloemfontein, Durban and Plettenberg Bay. I will use one post to show some of my photos of the highlights of this tour.

Today I am surely cured and feeling well! I made two paintings this morning under which I could sign with the new date 2011. Both paintings have the elements that make up the West Coast: sky and sea, rocks and sand and fynbos. We have magical summer days at the moment, it is good to be back!

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West Coast Wishes

This will be my last post of 2010. For me it was a lovely year with many West Coast paintings sold both locally and all over the world, thanks to the Internet.

To wish you well, I am using a framed effect I made in watercolours, containing our most popular images: the boats, the cottages, fisher folks, a gull and a delicious pot of mussels!

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Purple Ragwort (Senecio arenarius)

I am painting the last of the purple ragwort flowers of the season! Because I water my garden twice a week some of them survived a bit longer.

Ragwort make a wonderful display in springtime, colouring the fields around us to a purple landscape. The flowers are pretty but poisonous to humans and livestock as it is said to affect the liver. Yet my beloved voles, which I painted a few months ago, are vegetarians and find ragwort such a treat. It is just too cute to see the flowers in those little hand-like paws! I have found that if you move past a window or stir a curtain the voles are gone! They are extremely sensitive. Maybe the early morning sun blinded them a little this morning, so I stood behind the glass and got the photos I have been yearning for. I hope to invest in a telephoto lens for my camera, to catch some better shots in future. In the meantime I present Mr and Mrs Vole eating their purple ragwort breakfast.

I also paint these purple flowers to celebrate my brand-new purple blogspot : French Belles by Marie Theron.

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Happy Thanksgiving

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A year has passed and again I break away from the West Coast theme to wish my American children and friends Happy Thanksgiving. My daughter Helen in Texas is cooking up a storm for her family and friends. I enjoyed Thanksgiving so much when I was there in November 2000. Ah, the yams oven-baked with layers of apples in between really complemented the turkey! Spending very little on "props and flowers", she always creates a most beautiful table setting. Yesterday she told me: " Mom, we embrace this holiday, because there are always so much to be thankful for!"

The friends I want to send these wishes to are the few I know in person and the many kind people I have met and chatted with in the blogging world and the social media. I include the over 1600 secret and very silent US people who have visited my blog the last eighteen months. Enjoy, everyone!

This painting of a very South African-looking pumpkin farm is part of about 10 paintings I made when I was still planning my blog, then of course I decided on another formula of smaller and historically correct works. So these paintings have not been framed or exhibited. They fit nowhere in my oevre, but Mitzy the Maltese thinks that they do give some colour to her corner!

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Darling Angels

We could not believe that such a day was possible in the middle of summer: cold, wet, windy, the Full CapeTreatment! But, it was the day of the opening of the "Angels" Exhibition in our closest little town, Darling. I thought I would say very little (only this: The glass of Ormonde wine was very welcome!) and rather show lots of photos of the work of my closest artist friends and myself. My own contribution was two very sweet angels, first and second photos and one serious one. There is also a photo of the Mantis Art Gallery where it was held.

I need to say more of my serious angel. I saw this image as a large sculpture in Budapest when I had a solo exhibition there. It was midday and my photo showed a shadow so dark, it looked like a sharp gash through the sculpture. I loved the idea of going against all the rules in art to show a very strong vertical like that through the painting. It can resemble a Cross....and with it some inner emotion and loneliness.

For this exhibition we concentrated on small 8x8 affordable artworks, so the images are going at really good prices.

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Chincherinchees (Ornithogalum thyrsoides)

Enough about the exhibition, I say. It will be open until 21 st January 2011 and I will let you know what happens. Today with the end of the wildflower season in sight, I want to tell you about the flowers you probably know as "chinks". Summer is getting warmer and all over the fields they are drying off.

The Greeks, and some sources say the Romans, would describe something that was amazing, incredible and wonderful as "birds milk" which in translation would be ornis + gala. From there the scientific name Ornithogalum. Afrikaans speaking South Africans heard a ching sound when picking at the stems and that gave us the common name Chincherinchees.

You know by now that Kabeljoubank where I live is absolutely steeped in history and culture. Here the British Peer and her crew perished in 1896, and we still see pieces of their red bricks ballast, rounded by ocean movement to the size of pebbles. Here, also, if people will look where I direct them, the process of snoek drying in the seabreeze can be seen.

But this is the nicest Kabeljoubank story of all: Between the two world wars, tourists who had travelled to Cape Town by ocean liner or train, would sometimes in spring and early summer hire a horse cart and travel the distance to Kabeljoubank for a picnic. They admired the beautiful views, the bluest ocean, the fields of spring flowers. One of the sights they saw was the picking of chincherinchees (in bud form) to be exported to Covent Garden where they were sold, a popular flower which lasts for weeks in a vase.

Of course my vases at home have nothing of the sort, as all our flowers in the Cape Flower Kingdom are protected! To be admired, photographed, sketched, but never to be picked! The first image is my painting, the second the veld next to my studio, then a bunch I photographed at the annual Wild Flower Show and lastly a little macro photo I took. Do not forget to let me know if you have ever seen or grown "chinks"!

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A Slice of Life Exhibition

After all the anticipation to attend the opening, the day of week, the time of day and the great distance prevented me from attending the opening of the exhibition. Avril who owns the gallery wrote so well about it on the morning after that I am going to quote him here: " Difficult to describe unique events like these. Crazy, ridiculous, exciting, enjoyable, all at the same time. Maybe "memorable" is a fair description. Many, many guests and few serious problems. One of those events one has to attend to really appreciate.

Since the gallery opened for business on 20 September 2007 I always wanted to do a real "opening", where the paintings are "unveiled". And this was the golden opportunity to do it. Imagine the curtains coming down and 600 paintings becoming fully visible all at once. I enjoyed the exercise, and according to all accounts most guests did!

In my photos this week I show my works together, followed by all my seagull paintings.

Living here next to the coast, I can see a lot of individualism in the seagulls. The leaders, the lookouts, the extremely young and the old and overweight birds all represent themselves...Again I "humanize" them, which I cannot help. Look at the gull I was able to get very close to....he really thought the rope was a safeguard against an approaching human. Then there is the group who seems to wait for a signal from their leader, something like: On your marks, get set, GO!

Enjoy these photos!

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Gardening on the West Coast

In planning a West Coast garden, I decided to take my cue from the surrounding veld. There are no trees in the pristine fynbos, so I did not plant any. This is not a coast of waving palm trees and huge tall plants, and I often see people planting them because they love trees/want shade/want birds/need something tall as a focal point, or for whatever reason. But surely one would then attract the wrong sort of birds, because our Cape Robins, Francolins and Black Oystercatchers sleep on the ground or in low vegetation.

Another rule would be to have no flowers that will start spreading into the fynbos. Nasturtiums are a no-no! I plant so that there is always a great display of colour. This is a long narrow garden and I want colour as far as the eye can see. By not trimming and allowing plants to grow together there are never any weeds as there is no room for them. Because of harsh rainless summers you need plants that do not need a lot of water. We are planning to make some "green" plans this year to water the patch of lawn.

In the photos you will notice that I allow the wild pelargoniums, sorrel, watsonias, Livingstone daisies (bokbaai vygies), all types of aloes and ragwort to grow where they want to. I make no division between wild and cultivated plants.

My garden has been photographed by many people who can see it over the walls, and are thrilled by all the colour! This is a garden where I spend about 4 days working in a year, while the buffalo grass grows vertical and needs trimming about every third week only.

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A West Coast morning exhibition in Pretoria

The moment that I met a new friend, Zelda, on Facebook a year ago, she enthusiastically offered me an informal morning exhibition in Pretoria. To make things easy, I packed mostly smaller and unframed paintings. We could not wish for a lovelier Pretoria spring morning!.

1)The first photo shows the imposing gates of Zelda's home with a mass of sweetpeas in bloom.

2)Soon I had some flowers in my hand for a playful photo-session with my graceful hostess.

3)The paintings stood everywhere between roses, silver bowls and in the pretty garden.This painting of a lighthouse was the first to sell.

4) The cupcakes which the guests had with long girly-type drinks or champagne.

5) More artful cupcakes, as delicious as they look!

6) The antique roses that filled the house.

7) Gentle background music and french songs by Esperance.

8) A tearful meeting with Debbie whom I have met on blogging, Facebook and RedBubble! (The tears of emotion were mine!)

At the end of the day, I have sold 9 paintings and gave away two little ones as gifts. And of course, Zelda got the autumn doll painting that she loved.

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The Gannet Colony

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They are up with the first light in the morning and the daily choir of thousands of decibels hit the morning air above Bird Island. I suppose each shouts out his own hunger and intentions for fishing, and with such a crowd, there may also be a lot of admonitions to little ones not to get lost! Speaking of that: it is amazing how they land back in their own space after flight and always know their own little black blobs from the surrounding chicks!

With creatures living so close to each other, there is apt to be some tension. Gannets relieve the tension by doing the neck-rubbing ceremony with the birds working on their nerves. It is not a mating ceremony. In this large painting, I have painted this beautiful and graceful movement. Well, here we have a lesson from the gannets: if a guy or lady grabs the parking spot we were already entering (!!!!), maybe we should shake hands or give them a little hug! See? the tension will be gone!

Further in this panorama, you will see the largish chicks, the hesitant flyers and the airborne ones. In the final and 5th post on this theme(which may only appear in ten day's time unless I get an internet connection where I am going) I will post the last of this series on the gannets of Lambert's Bay! The theme will be MAN and his relationship with the threatened birds.

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Meet the Gannets

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You don't like crowds and all those loud holiday entertainments? The answer to avoiding all that is to drive North all along the unspoiled West Coast. As my blog is now stretching to distant places we need to stay overnight at our destinations. So off we went to spend a weekend at my favourite place, Lambert's Bay. As we arrived, the whole area spelt out the theme of quiet restfulness. A leasurely meal of one big crayfish with lovely Cape wine dealt with Friday evening.

With what excitement I crossed the foot bridge to Bird Island the next morning! There is a very modern but tastefully built hide at the end of the pathway. "We have 24,000 gannets here" a friendly lady told us. Apparently these precious birds are counted continuously. I spent hours observing them from the hide and will have much to tell (and paint) over the next few posts.

There is a strange story playing out in this painting! The island is also the home of Cape fur seals, introduced to the area in 1985. These fur seals, as we know, have had a hard time in the past and are now furiously protected. And in Lambert's Bay it is not the cats and dogs fighting but the gannet lovers and the seal lovers. Seals eat gannet eggs and chicks, and may lead to dwindling numbers of gannets.

But the seals have a right of living space too. The solution at the moment is but a simple plan. The seals are carefully watched and chased away by shouting at them if they go near eggs or chicks, and here you see it: a man keeps watch from a boat rowed by his team-mate, and the gannets can breed in peace. Can you see them in my third image?

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