loosening up in the Botanical Garden.Concetta Flore

I grabbed a large sketching pad (30x40cm), japanese watercolors I'd never really tried, brushes and palette. A lovely day, yesterday, at the Botanical gardens in Rome. Although the paper wasn't much good, the colors are very bright and more opaque that ours. I  painted directly without pencil, bamboo, palm trees and a tameryx. Fun.

Stems of bamboo - Maree

stems of bamboo
supple and strongly devout
holding leaves secure



Painting bamboo is one of those relaxing exercise for me, filling the brush with colour and just pulling quick strokes onto the paper. I can carry one for HOURS! This is the same bamboo I tried to eradicate from my garden last year, which seems to have come back with a vengeance!

Did you know that bamboo requires NO fertilizer, pesticides or chemicals to grow? It is one of the fastest growing plants on the planet. When measuring carbon dioxide, bamboo consumes 45% more carbon then a similar stand of trees.

Like Cotton, bamboo is used to make a variety of products, like towels, bath robes, pillow cases, T-shirts and socks. There are over 1000 different species of bamboo and most bamboo products come from a type of bamboo called Moso or, if you're botanically inclined, Phyllostachys pubescens, a variety of bamboo that Pandas do not eat.

Aggravated bamboo! - Maree

Soil . . . scoop up a handful of the magic stuff. Look at it closely. What wonders it holds as it lies there in your palm. Tiny sharp grains of sand, little faggots of wood and leaf fiber, infinitely small round pieces of marble, fragments of shell, specks of black carbon, a section of vertebrae from some minute creature. And mingling with it all the dust of countless generations of plants and flowers, trees, animals and – yes – our own, age-long forgotten forebears, gardeners of long ago. Can this incredible composition be the common soil?
- Stuart Maddox Masters, The Seasons Through



A bit of Bamboo growing in the one corner of my pond area - I DID make a concerted effort to remove it all, after it almost cracked my pond in half, but here it is, back again after our Spring rains! When removing this, as you dig, you see runners going in all directions under-ground, and it's not good enough to just chop them off and remove the main plant, because shortly there are sprouts everywhere! It's as if the digging and chopping actually aggravates and activates them!