Illustrating Autumn
I drew this botanical illustration in my little notebook this morning.
She started typing and told me she was writing all about this to share with her friends.
More Learning Do you want to learn even more about the kind of trees that lose their leaves in the winter? Here's another blog post that we wrote.
I picked up a fallen cottonwood leaf and then realized I haven't shared with people just how leaves fall in the autumn.
I decided to make a sketch of the leaf, and then a sketch of a bare branch. Did you know that a Cottonwood leaf has two parts? The heart-shaped leaf blade, which has serrated margins, and the petiole. The petiole is like a little stem that connects the leaf to the branch.
Then I looked up some images scientists had taken of the leaves where they connect with the stem just before it fell off. The scientist probably preserved the plant with a chemical fixative like paraformaldehyde and then slowly put the preserved plant through the process of resin infiltration, then the leaf and stem were cut into thin sections for easier viewing using a microscope. They may have stained the tissue with pigments that bind to specific parts of the anatomy, but those colors were lost to time as the photos that I viewed were presented in black and white. I decided to sketch one of those images.
I decided to label my drawings so people can learn all of the anatomical pieces. These are the sorts of sketches of my own sections of plants that I made in Plant Anatomy courses in college.
Here are the words that are scribbled in pencil around the drawings:
Autumn leaves. Each leaf falls because they have been cut off. Suberin (wax) and lignin make up the abscission zone. This is where they break. Vasculature is pinched off (as the abscission zone develops). The leaf dies, slowly deprived of moisture and nutrients.
Here is a photo of autumn leaves just outside a window.
Invitation to Create
We talked about autumn when we had paper and crayons in front of us. She asked me to draw leaves for her to color. Then she found scissors and she cut some out. She asked for tape so she could add them to a board. She asked me to write "leaf."
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