Most of us remember the summer of 2020. For me it was a little different than for most, because that was my first summer being ill with Covid – and realising I wasn’t getting better. Most people got out of lockdown in a few months; those hundreds of thousands of us whom Covid disabled (and the many more who were already chronically sick and had been imprisoned in their homes for years, if not decades) are still trapped. But that summer, I was well enough to get out of my home most days and go for a short walk. Like many people in lockdown, I took the opportunity to use that experience of being trapped in a smaller area to look closer; to get to know my local area better; to learn more about the more than human world immediately around me. I’ve lived in the same flat for over 20 years, and I’d never spent so much time sitting in our shared back green, or slowly walking around the surrounding streets, the park, the cemetery, and the canal towpath. At the same time, I was using what energy I had to explore creative activities. When I learned about the 100 Days Project Scotland, it was an ideal way to merge the two urges. I set out to closely observe one plant each day, to draw it and to learn its name. 

I took an old secondhand book – a Soviet popular geography book from 1966, translated into English; full of progaganda about Soviet engineering achievements and idealistic opinions about the bright future of human society enabled by technology – and altered it by drawing one plant every day, each observed from life. Noticing, identifying, drawing, learning. The beauty or accuracy or artistic merit of the drawing itself wasn’t the point for me – what was important was learning to recognise many new plants, and becoming better acquainted with plants I already knew, by their appearance and habitat and name; and the slow, satisfying filling of this old altered book. To underline that (and subvert my lack of confidence about not being able to draw ‘well’!) I drew each plant using a dip pen and ink, and added colour with chalk pastels – neither of which I can be particularly neat or accurate with. That, combined with drawing over the existing typeface in the old book, helped to remove any pressure to create something that looked ‘good’, and I could focus on observing and learning.