Lucifer Crocosmia (and My Digital "Perpetual Journal")

 

7/2/23 Lucifer Crocosmia in a neighbor's garden

About a year ago, I finally learned the name of a flower I had long admired, a favorite of summer, in fact: the “Lucifer” variety of Crocosmia. A brilliant red, they look exotic and tropical to me (even its varietal name is rather curious). Last year I sketched some a couple of times, both in their growing context – around a neighbor’s stairway and in a traffic circle on our street.

They are lighting up the neighborhood now, a little earlier than last year (based on the dates I sketched them). This time I thought I’d make a more detailed sketch of a single stem. I knew exactly where I would go to do it: The same neighbor’s street-side garden where I’ve sketched irises in spring. Both irises and Croscosmia are so tall that the flowers are nearly at my eye level (a benefit of being “vertically challenged”) and therefore easy and comfortable to see while standing on the sidewalk. As I happily sketched in the 68-degree sunshine last Sunday, the hummingbirds dining on the blossoms nearby were just as happy.

Incidentally, a few years ago I learned the term “perpetual journal” in the context of nature journaling. The concept is similar to my closest experience, which is the five-year diary. In both cases, each page is headed by the day’s date (or a week), and an entry is made on that page in each successive year on the same date. Using such a format, a gardener could easily see what the temperature or rain trends were in years past on that same date, for example, or which flowers were blooming by then.

Although I’m not inclined to keep a perpetual nature journal (my nature sketching is too sporadic and my data collection too inconsistent for it to be useful; I don’t even have my own garden to document), I often think of my digitized sketches and this blog as a sort of perpetual sketch journal. Since every sketch I’ve scanned in the past 12 years (which is nearly all I’ve made) has a consistent dating format on my hard drive, it’s fast and easy to see what I was sketching every year on any given date. 

Just for fun, I just ran a search for July 5, and results range from a statue in Boston in 2012 to Tacoma’s Old Town Dock in 2014 to a Lake City Farmers Market busker in 2018 to some alstroemeria in my own backyard in 2020 (OK, so I do have a bit of a garden, but it consists only of plants that tend to themselves). In addition, every fall when I sketch the same maples, or every spring when I sketch the same cherries and plums, I use my blog to see whether the color of those specific trees was earlier or later than in previous years. Anything I sketch becomes an automatic “entry” in my digital perpetual sketch journal.

(The beauty of my “system” is that I never planned it. When I saw that I was still keeping up my daily sketching habit several months in, I began this blog, which required digitizing my sketches. My natural inclination was to name files consistently by date and subject, and the system was created. Who knew that it would still be useful nearly 12 years later?)

Anyway, this all came to mind when I wanted to see what the date was that I had sketched the Crocosmia last year, and it was easy to search for it on my hard drive. Although it’s not nearly as cool and organic as opening a physical journal and seeing notes and sketches of what was growing in my garden on that date last year or five years ago, I love the continuous documentation that occurs just by sketching every day.