About

I’m just an enthusiastic amateur naturalist with a fascination for all aspects of the natural world. I have always been interested in nature, but it wasn’t until I bought myself a digital camera back in the early noughties that the natural world opened up to me. The camera gave me a reason and means to get out into nature and to really look at what I was seeing, rather than just viewing it from a distance.

 

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I spent twelve years doing a higgledy-piggledy science degree with the Open University back in the days when it was affordable and you could more or less study what you liked for as long as you liked, so mine is an assortment of biology, geology, ecology, environmental science and chemistry, and I did far more courses than I needed to, but not enough in any one subject to be able to give the degree a name! Later, after discovering, to my own surprise, how fascinating plants are, I did the University Certificate in Biological Recording and Species Identification with Manchester Metropolitan University. I also have a level 4 FISC (Field Identification Skills Certificate), which is a measure of plant identification skills.

 

I started drawing, and later painting, in the summer of 2017, initially with the simple aim of using it as a tool to help me see and remember the features of plants that are critical to their identification, particularly for hard-to-distinguish groups of species. I still use it for that purpose but have grown to enjoy drawing and painting for their own sake. When drawing or painting, you gain an intimacy with your subject that you don’t get from just looking at it.

 

Where the natural world is concerned, you never stop learning, and that is one of the reasons it is so compelling – the more you look, the more you see, and it is definitely the case that the more you learn, the more you realise how much you don’t know! It’s important to enjoy the journey…