Poetry in lines and colors

"Short of Aphrodite, there is nothing lovelier on this planet than a flower, nor more essential than a plant. The true matrix of human life is the greensward covering mother earth. Without green plants, we would neither breathe nor eat. On the undersurface of every leaf, a million movable lips are engaged in devouring carbon dioxide and expelling oxygen. Altogether, 25 million square miles of leaf surface are daily engaged in this miracle of photosynthesis, producing oxygen and food for man and beast." Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird - The Secret Life of Plants

Here comes the Witch , solemn and imperturbable, she is the queen of the realm of the ferocious plants. What kind of magic is she going to put in place with the help of the little black creature at her feet?

What one has to do to escape the rage of two fighting plants! To avoid being involved in this weird boxing match our hero has no better idea than putting on a cat costume and hide himself under the table... Will the plants find him after the knock out?

Very quickly sketched for this week's Illustration Friday... Anonymous is sitting quietly in the silence of a green room. He is grey/black like his cat while around him the lively colors of plants and flowers are threatening his motionless life. The call of nature, friendly and disquieting at the same time...  The landscape in the picture is a view shot from the cliffs of Runde island, Norway.

Just a quick sketch for this week Illustration Friday challenge while I'm trying to gather the ideas for my next book project, the illustrations for a children's story written by Nicholas Goh. It is unlikely you will be able to grow such rainbow of colors in your own garden, but maybe you could easily manage to get a blue elephant to water your plants. Sketching is often a matter of thought association: the perplexed cactuses brought to my mind the book "the secret life of plants" a weird research by Peter Tompkin and Christopher Bird, edited in 1973, which introduced the intriguing idea of plants having their own emotional life as well as their own form of communication.