Posts Tagged ‘plants’
New Urban Mystery: Dancing with Trees
A new Urban Mystery is available! Dancing with Trees is the 5th novella in the Series. The story is set in Fredericton, New Brunswick. An artist, Katie, who is cataloguing interesting trees in the city, happens on a mystery associated with the trees. As she walks the city streets, she encounters a strange dancer who shares a special relationship with each tree.
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Fredericton, known as the City of Stately Elms, has long been celebrated for its old trees and urban forest. The story was a natural for me – during my career as an environmental botanist, I often worked with trees, including those in the city.
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The Urban Mysteries are short, at only about 20,000 words, and each one is a quick, easy read. So far, there are five novellas in the Series:
- Office Green: set in Halifax, NS
- City Grotesque: set in Saint John, NB
- Roundabout: set in Fredericton, NB
- Hollow Hotel: set in Saint John, NB
- Dancing with Trees: set in Fredericton, NB
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The books are available at Dog Ears Books in Oromocto, New Brunswick, and 2nd Story Books in Harvey, New Brunswick. They are also available at Amazon.ca, under my pen name, Alexandra Tims.
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Hope you enjoy these books!
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All my best!
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Jane Tims
(a.k.a. Alexandra)
Office Green: a new urban mystery
I am so happy to have published the first in my Urban Mystery Series: Office Green. The book tells the story of Hannah and her plant care business. She goes from office to office in the city of Halifax, watering office plants and battling plant diseases, white fly, and nutrition problems. She also sees things she is not meant to see and gets herself into all kinds of trouble.
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So, what’s with the cockroach on the cover??? During her adventures, Hannah keeps a few handy ‘weapons’ within reach in case she gets in trouble. And what better scare-tactic than a huge African cockroach, rescued from the university biology labs. You’ll have to read the book to find out how that cockroach helps her escape from a few bad guys.
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If you like tending to indoor plants, if you love a quick read, and if you like reading about resourceful amateur detectives, you will like Office Green. You can get a copy at Dog Eared Books in Oromocto (Unit #218, 281 Restigouche Road). You can also order a copy from Amazon, just click here.
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All my best,
Alexandra Tims (a.k.a.Jane)
spring plants and flowers
A beautiful day here… I planted my small deck garden (yellow wax beans, zucchini, cucumber and lettuce), all old seed, so the seeds were planted thick. The red squirrel has already been here to see if he can purloin some seeds, but I have my beds covered with metal grates!!!!
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I also nosed around for some springtime plants: the season moves so fast, it is hard to catch them! In our lawn, we have bugleweed (ajuga) and lily-of-the-valley in bloom, and columbines showing their floral buds. In the woods are bunchberry, teaberry and partridgeberry. No photos, but I have some drawings and paintings for you.
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If you love springtime flowers, you will love the new book ‘A Child’s Botanical Alphabet’ authored by Jennifer Houle and illustrated by me…. to order just click here.
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I love this time of year. The wild shrubs are in bloom. Our flowering crab apple only lasted a day and now our walkway is a scattering of pink petals. Other types of apple are in bloom and create puffs of white and pink against the new-green of the tree leaves. Bushes with elongated bundles of white show me where there will be chokecherries.
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All my best to you, on this lovely spring day.
Jane (a.k.a. Alexandra)
a botanical alphabet
In the last couple of years, I have had the happy task of helping Jennifer Houle, award-winning author, produce her new book, A Child’s Botanical Alphabet. The book takes the reader through the alphabet with examples from the world of botany, plants local to New Brunswick and the Maritime provinces.
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My specific work was to produce the drawings for the book and undertake its formatting on the way to it becoming a published book. I also wrote ‘Notes for the Curious,’ to enable caregivers to give a little more information to children abut the plants they encounter in the book.
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The images in the book began as black and white pencil drawings. Before this, I had never done digital illustrations, so I began by colourizing each drawing. After this, I leaned to do grades of colour and shading. In the end, I did the 26 illustrations, one for each letter of the alphabet, and other images to illustrate the life cycle of the luna moth and fill in the story we wanted to tell.
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I also experimented with background colour and learned to present the images in the proportions of the final book. For the first time, I attempted images that would bleed to the very edge of the page.
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The book is an old-fashioned approach to learning the alphabet, but also a way of encouraging children to look closely at their surroundings and interact with them. To help with this, we have shown that plants are part of a larger community of plants and animals. The book shows the life cycle of the luna moth–we have hidden the luna at various stages of its life throughout the images in the book. We also encourage children to collect, with respect, examples of the plants they find and to learn about the other plants they see. Where I have left parts of the images without colour, the children are invited to add their own colour to the book.
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At last, A Child’s Botanical Alphabet is ready to present to the world! Both paperback and hardcover versions of the book are now available at Amazon.ca by clicking here. On May 11, Saturday, we will launch the book at the Kennebecasis Public Library in Quispamsis, with a special presentation and art activity for the children. After that, the book will be available in both paperback and hardcover at various events, including 2024 Book Fairs in Moncton-Riverview (July 27), Saint John (September 14), and Fredericton (October 19).
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We hope you enjoy this wonderful book! We are looking forward to showing it to you and introducing children to the world of local plants.
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All my best!!!
Jane
an alien flora
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soon! a new children’s alphabet book
On my list of goals for the year is a project I haven’t talked about before. A friend and I have been working on her new book, A Child’s Botanical Alphabet.
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I have known Jenn for years, since we both worked on Fredericton’s WordFeast in 2017. Jennifer Houle is a seasoned author, with two award-winning poetry collections, The Back Channels and Virga (Signature Editions). Her first children’s book, Un logis pour Molly/A Home for Molly, was published by Éditions Bouton d’Or Acadie in summer of 2022 in both French and English.
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Here is what Jenn is saying about A Child’s Botanical Alphabet:
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This book started out as a little rhyme I made up for my boys when they were toddlers. I loved teaching them to name common flowers & trees around the yard & neighbourhood. Having a vocabulary for things helps deepen imagination, sense of relatedness. I imagined it as a book that caregivers could read with children as they explored … the pages are meant to be coloured on & leaves & flowers pressed between pages. So it’s a book meant to be used. Oh! And there are Luna Moths fluttering throughout. . .presiding spirits.
Jennifer Houle, Facebook, March 20, 2024
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When Jenn asked me to do the illustrations for her book, I said yes because I loved the concept and I had some suitable pencil drawings already done. I knew from the start I wanted the illustrations to be in colour, so I did my first work of this sort in the digital world. I used GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) to colourize each pencil drawing. I have learned so much about colour and its presentation. Jennifer was easy to work with, so in spite of some learning curves, we are very happy with the result.
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As we work on the last small edits, we are excited to see A Child’s Botanical Alphabet in its final form and show it to you. Stayed tuned for more information!
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All my best,
Jane
taking an art course
I trying to add some diversity to my day, so I am taking a course from Domestika: A Meditative Approach to Botanical Illustration. I have been through the introductory videos and last evening, I began the drawing exercises. Where I am, I have no scanner or camera, but I will use some photos and drawings from past excursions to illustrate what I have to say.
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The first lesson is to observe simple shapes in the plant you want to draw. The instructor uses cacti for his subject matter. I am using water lilies of various types. I usually draw with pencil, so this is the first time I have used pen. I am a ‘maker of mistakes,’ so the eraser does a lot of work when I sit down to draw. Using pen sounds a bit intimidating, but I will prevail.
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The simple shapes associated with the water lily are the elongated outlines of flower petals, and the deeply-notched spherical outlines of the various leaves. For my drawings I chose Nuphar lutea, Nymphaea odorata, and Nuphar microphylla, all species found in New Brunswick.
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The above is a crude copy ‘by finger’ of one of the drawings I did, this one of Nymphaea odorata, showing the basic shapes.
The next lesson is a more accurate representation of the plant.
I am feeling that you have to go backwards to move forwards. We will see.
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All my best
Jane
wildflowers in the ditches
The season certainly flies by! This week I am noticing the flowers in the ditches. Daisies, bedstraw, vipers bugloss, sweet clover, yarrow and so on. Today I am curious about a white flower occurring in soft low mounds along the highway. Bladderwort campion or maidenstears.
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Bladderwort campion, Silene vulgaris, is a kind of faerie-tale flower, because of its bladders, small enough to be used by the faerie-folk to transport their drink. The alternate name ‘maidenstears,’ is also fanciful. The flowers are white, sticking above the top of a red-veined bladder. Reminds me of newly-bought vegetables poking above a grocery store paper bag.
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The bladder is made of fused sepals. The flower has five petals, each deeply divided into two lobes. Bladderwort campion is common, found in ditches, meadows and other waste places.
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Scanning the ditches for new plants is a habit I developed in my early days as a botanist. Even now I keep a list, in my head, of the plants I see as we drive along any road. A pleasant pass time for summer!
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All my best,
Jane
roses by the road
A few years ago, we trimmed out the bushes all along our cabin road, to prevent our truck from getting scratched. During the trimming, my husband saved a small prickly rose bush near to the road edge. Each spring we watch for the pale pink of its blooms. Each fall, we count the red rose hips as we drive by. This year, the bush has grown as tall as me! Today, it was covered with pale pink roses and smelled so sweet!
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This is the swamp rose (Rosa palustris), a common wild rose in New Brunswick. You can recognize it by its pale pink flowers, its hooked spines, and its narrow stipules (winged sheaths at the bases of leaf stalks). In fall, it will have small round red rosehips.
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All my best,
Jane
lily-of-the-valley
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lily-of-the-valley
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Convallaria majalis L.
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where they came from
I do not know, perhaps
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from my mother’s old home
in a shovel-full of lilac
a sheet of white writing paper
in a green box crammed with letters
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perhaps from my grandfather’s farm
tucked in beside the creeping Jenny
a green and white plate printed
with a saying about home
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perhaps from a seed in the gravel
spread on the paths or the road
a line of red pebbles
in a spill of quartz
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every summer the colony spreads
green flames lick at gravel
white bells, delicate perfume
scarlet berries
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a letter not written
a plate hung on the wall
a pathway leading home
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All my best!
Stay safe!
Jane
nichepoetryandprose 