SQUEAKY BINDERS
Lockdown Lawn
Where the Grasses and Wild Flowers flourish…
4 Designs
The Grasses, The Wild Flowers I, The Wild Flowers II, The Compilation.
Available as
Squeaky’s First Choice Edition Illustrated Notebook
Our First Choice Edition handmade notebook contains all the ‘‘Lockdown Lawn’ illustrations with plenty of room inside for all your creative writings - makes a great gift too.
Squeaky’s Special Edition Illustrated Notebook
Our Special Edition handmade Notebook has a truly distinctive hard case cover containing all the ‘Lockdown Lawn’ illustrations and pages inside ready to be filled with all your lovely words.
Art Cards and Postcards
4 ‘Lockdown Lawn’ designs available as individual Art Cards with envelopes.
3 Postcards available too.
Mini Journal, Art Card and Pencil Set
Art Cards Wallet Gift Set
6 Art Cards, 2 of each design, presented in a lovely folding wallet for storing and display.
Inspiration and technique
A broken mower and Lockdown allowed a delightful array of wild flowers and grasses to rewild my front lawn.
The fascinating diversity of plant life that I discovered flourishing there inspired me to create a series of original coloured pencil drawings.
Wild Hedgerow Bouquet
How lucky am I to be able to gather such a beautiful bouquet of wild grasses from my local hedgerows?
Strolling along the quiet country lanes on my daily dog walks, all these fascinating seed heads, moving gracefully in the breeze and shining against the light, caught my eye and I picked a bunch. At home, I created a small concertina book of coloured pencil drawings, featuring just a few favourites from my collection, the beginning of a new project I thought.
Then Covid 19 and the first Lockdown happened and the Grasses Project went on hold…
But at the same time my front lawn continued to grow, left uncut due to the mower breaking down, and the amazing diversity of grasses and wild flowers lying latent there started to emerge.
The lawn became our refuge, that is for Monty and I. Sometimes we’d sit and think, sometimes we’d just sit together. I did start to notice new leaves appearing and tiny flowers amidst the clouds of oxeye daisies that come up every year.
The sun shone and we cast our shared shadows on the lawn.
Grasses
As the lawn grew, seed heads formed and I collected each one - to my amazement 13 distinct varieties! Time to draw my collection, on a flat sheet of paper this time, observing and recording all the colours, shapes and structures I found there.
My Grasses Project was evolving.
I always suspected the oxeye daisies had plans to colonise the whole garden!
The mower, up till then, had thwarted their spread but its demise soon allowed their true intentions to became clear and the rest of the wild flower world soon joined this welcome ‘invasion’.
As the weeks and months passed by I began collecting and drawing each delicate bloom, oftentimes familiar to me but occasionally, less so. The search to identify my discoveries proved to be a real treasure trove of evocative common names ;-
Bird’s Foot Trefoil, Fox and Cubs, Sheep’s Sorrel, Selfheal, Lady’s Bedstraw and Common Mouse Ear!! to name just a few.
We made it through Lockdown together thanks in no small way to the comfort we found in the nature rewilding itself just outside the front door. We had to say our goodbyes in July, lying peacefully amongst the daisies and clover leaves…
Lockdown Lawn
Dedicated to Monty the Golden Retriever, my constant companion, who spent his last Summer with me
sharing our shadows on the Lockdown Lawn.