Wildflower identification and drawing – Monday Mindfulness

This week’s Mindful Monday is identifying and drawing wildflowers! The creation of art and drawing has long been linked to mindfulness (how do you think they sold all those adult colouring in books!), so this week with an added nature based twist I set out to identify and draw wildflowers- You can see my experience and drawing attempts in the vlog here or read on to learn how you can locate, identify, and draw wildflowers no matter where you are!  

What makes a flower wild?

The term wildflower has been slightly blurred by the sale of ‘wildflower mixes’ and ‘seeds’ however, to put it simply wildflowers are those species that are uncultivated or that grow spontaneously under conducive conditions without human attention or interaction. They are usually sturdier species able to reproduce by themselves.

Where can I find wildflowers?

Wildflowers as I found out are actually surprisingly easy to locate and find in both rural and urban environments as our understanding of their importance (and action to grow more) has increased in recent years wildflowers meadows have sprung up all over the place. Here is a few suggested locations for you to find wildflowers wherever you are:

• Hedgerows/Country lanes
• Church/Graveyards
• Curbs and roundabouts (although not a good idea to look at these ones up close)
• Wildflower meadows- these are increasing in numbers, and are increasingly being planted in more urban locations

A graveyard…Really?

This might come as a surprise, (it certainly wasn’t something I had concerned until I went on a wildflower course), but graveyards and churchyards can prove to be a great spot for finding wildflowers and the great news is most cities, towns, nearly everywhere with a resident human population has a graveyard/burial site. Obviously, this is not a suggestion to be disrespectful or in anyway interfere with graves/burials. However, most graveyards have older areas which are less managed, that have wildflowers growing. There is even specific organisations working to increase wildflower growth in these sort of areas, as they are often safe from interference (nobody is going to build on a graveyard) and as previously stated are located all over the country. If you do choose to visit a church/graveyard in search of flowers, always be respectful of the graves and location, and keep wildflower interference to a minimum.

What do I do once I’ve found one?

This is an interesting question, and some people like to pick and examine flowers more closely, or take some home to press into paper etc. However, personally unless I am specifically looking to press some flowers, I prefer to take photos of the different wildflowers, following the ‘leave no trace’ rule. If everyone was to pick the wildflowers there would be no wildflowers- obviously this is unlikely, but I like to keep it in mind.

Identification and drawing

The fun stage, you’ve found a wildflower – but what is it? In my vlog I used a wildflower guide I was given at a workshop however I have since created my own free printable guide containing information on the most common wildflowers in the UK; this can be found at the bottom of this article. On the wildflower course I attended they also recommended this book for identification and further reading, I have yet to purchase it but was told if I want to start getting into wildflowers this is the book you should purchase! They also used pocket lenses to examine the flowers more closely I did not have one at the time of filming my vlog but have since gone onto purchase one which I find very useful and fun to use!

Drawing your wildflowers, I found this to be the trickiest stage of the process and the one I got the least out of in terms of mindfulness. I think this was because of my perfectionist nature and not liking how my free hand drawings turned out; however maybe this will be your favourite part! I used coloured pencils, a blank notebook, and my photos for reference for this final stage.

Is this a good mindfulness practice?  

This is really up to you to decide, personally I had a lot of fun locating and identifying wildflowers and think perhaps if I lived in the inner city or anywhere that was less ‘completely in the middle of the countryside’ I would have gotten more out of this experience as I wouldn’t be so acclimatised to seeing wildflowers everywhere, however I did enjoy stopping and really looking/identifying different species. I hope you enjoyed this weeks Mindful Monday and if you would like to let me know about your experiences or tune in for next weeks Mindful Monday you can find me on a range of different social media platforms.