Empress of India Nasturtiums - Garden Sketchbook Journal

Another favorite little plant in our garden is this particular variety of nasturtium, "Empress of India".  We grow several varieties each year. They seem to like growing on or near our rock wall in the front yard. Certain varieties trail down the wall nicely and other mound up nicely in the flower bed. These mound up beautifully. It did seem to sort of split into two colors though, one being a deeper blue green leaf and a slightly cooler, deeper ruby red blossom. The other part of the plant went sort of paler yellow green leaf, and deep orange blossom. I painted this a little over a week ago, and it is still putting out blooms! 

This past weekend we did a lot of 'fall maintenance' in the garden. It's time to cut the last of the zinnias,

So we did....which leads to this:

and this:

and this!

So you can see where this is leading! Lots of flowers means lots of flower paintings. I love to paint from life, but these are likely to have a short life...they only hang on for so long. In the mean time, I'm working on some color sketches for a rather LARGE landscape commission! Exciting stuff going on this fall!

Weekends tend to be filled with garden chores, while making art and all that the business entails fills my week. Other garden chores that we got completed over the weekend were saving seeds, pulling out old pumpkin vines, old annuals that were looking raggedy, tilling up the soil (hubby does that part!) and.....finally....we did it again...PLANTED 600 TULIP BULBS! whew! and actually, it was much easier this year! Not sure why it nearly killed me last year. Maybe we're getting smarter about this?! It's gonna be a hum-dinger of a Spring garden! woohoo!