At last spring has sprung and it's time to get outside and get on with the gardening so I haven't done a lot of sketching lately. Yesterday I started on the annual pruning of my buddleas. I've got 3 different varieties now as you can see in this sketch from a few years ago.
These are one of my favourite garden shrubs, although they are considered to be weeds when they grow in the wrong places. When we bought our house 13 years ago there was this wonderful clump in the back garden consisting of 5 shrubs planted close together. They grow up to about 10 feet tall and are covered in fragrant blossom all the summer.
I've taken cuttings and planted them in lots of other places around the garden as well as stealing twigs from plants down the lane. A few years ago a friend even brought me some special deep purple cuttings from his garden in England when he came on his boat for his summer holiday. They survived several weeks of sea air before he finally arrived in Perros and we got together for our annual barbecue.
Buddleas are nicknamed the butterfly plant as they always attract these beautiful insects and I love to identify all the different species that come to feed on the nectar.
2013 was a particularly good year for butterflies and I really had a lot of fun trying to capture them in this sketch.
I hope you've enjoyed my trip down memory lane through the pages of my sketchbooks and I hope to see you here again soon when I get my crayons out again!
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