Yesterday Gayla and I had a rewarding day doing gardening and garden-related errands. As the weather did its current norm — leap-frogging between glorious and tragic — we cut into soil, positioned and repositioned rocks, added and moved plants, decided then undecided, and generally experimented.

This is the season you can do that sort of thing. We stood up on our porch and eventually went upstairs to look out on the garden from above trying to visualize new pathways, new curves, new clusters of ornament, and the plants still to appear and grow into the shapes we sketched in the dirt.

Last week I wrote about “just digging in”. Gayla and I talked about this in the garden and as it applies to the garden. Digging puns aside, gardens can only be designed on paper up to the point where shovels go into the ground and plants start asserting their true shapes and sizes.

For this week’s drawing, Gayla asked me if I wanted to try drawing on some old wallpaper she had found and that became the plan. The wallpaper was brittle and alternately rebuffed and soaked in various media I drew onto it. I applied and washed, reapplied, scribbled, and scrubbed.

Working in the garden is like this — a multi-seasonal mixed-media creative process. Gardening’s successes and rewards often come as surprise borne of knowledge, experimentation, caring, tending, and natural and personal whim.

— Davin

Birds portrayed in the “Drawing from Nature” series by Davin Risk are purely imaginary — any similarity to true species is entirely accidental.