27 April finds us waking to large flakes of snow falling thickly all over our green spring landscape. By 09:00 there are 4 or 5 centimetres of heavy snow on the ground and large clumps of it clinging to twigs and branches. Along the path beneath the Manitoba Maples behind our house, I find blobs of wet snow bowing the newly opened magenta blossoms of the Honesty right to the ground, and the large patch of white and purple Violets are all touselled and untidy, having been pelted from above by lumps of wet snow falling from the trees. Flowers in chaos with incursions of white - a great subject for watercolour!
It continues to snow all day, so I take my subject indoors via digital photograph, and keep a fire going in the cookstove as I paint my watercolour by the kitchen window.
These are European Viola odorata brought in 1979 from my grandparents' place in Danbury, Connecticut, where they'd covered quite a bit of ground through my boyhood. Now they're one of the main ground covers here, spreading like invasive aliens in several shady parts of the lawn. We eat lots of the flowers and foliage in spring salads, and they seem to push out the native Viola pubescens. Our plan for this patch include dispersing the Ramps (Allium tricoccum) that have formed clumps among the Violets as part of our project of restoring native forest floor vegetation in the newly shady places on our land.
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