One Leaf a Day Challenge - #3

When I took Henry to see the doctor this morning, I almost drove off the road when we rounded a bend and saw the row of ginkgo trees flanking the parking lot.  Every tree was at its peak of yellow perfection today.  That mass of solid lemon yellow, with flaming orange and red maple trees in the background, and the purple Ragged Mountains in the distance . . . Man, it's a wonder anyone gets any work done in the building, with that picture postcard view out the windows!

I have to be honest, I never really liked ginkgo trees until I began to study botanical painting.  This stems from my youth, when our next door neighbor planted several ginkgo trees near the lot line and the female trees dropped their sticky (and extremely stinky!) seed pods in our tiny city garden.  My mom, who is otherwise a law-abiding citizen, got so fed up with cleaning up the mess she climbed the fence in the dark of night and gave the trees a drink of gasoline, precipitating their demise.  Our neighbor, who knew nothing about city gardening, replaced his mysteriously dead ginkgo trees with a small stand of bamboo, which quickly shot up 30 feet and became a large stand, shading our garden entirely and thus proving the adage, crime doesn't pay.

So it wasn't until I studied plant morphology that I gained an appreciation for this often maligned tree.  Yes, it is messy, but did you know it is one of the best-known examples of a living fossil?  It has not evolved appreciably since the Pliocene era,  with fossils recognisably related to modern ginkgo dating back even further,  270 million years. This is one ancient tree!  It's leaf structure is unique among seed plants in that the veins fan out individually from the base into the leaf blade, sometimes splitting but never joining with neighboring veins to form a network. This makes it fun to paint! 

I picked this random leaf off the ground, and at the time it was almost a solid, uniform yellow.  I wasn't sure if it would make an interesting painting.  But like a banana peel, it immediately began to wither and brown, so I had to drop all activity when I got home this morning (oh darn) and sit down to paint, before it lost all its lovely yellow color.  It was a challenge to paint because it was turning color before my eyes.  After a couple of hours, I had to finally declare victory and stop recording the changing hues.  Yellow is very tricky to work with, by the way, since it can quickly and easily look muddy and overworked.  It isn't one of those colors you can layer endlessly with shades and gradations.  I think I caught myself just in the nick of time.  Enjoy!