I fell asleep at 9:30 last night. Lovely. So I didn’t draw, and have made up for it with two trees today.
Baker cypress–sigh. I’m getting a little tired of these cypresses. No, they aren’t all alike, but still. I’m ready for something completely different.

But the Tecate cypress! Its range is limited almost entirely to San Diego County, and it is the only home of the Thorne’s Hairstreak butterfly. Between that and the fact that my inspiration for this yearlong project was my friend Janet’s year of butterflies, of course I had to draw the two species together. They are intertwined–the larvae of the butterfly, which lays her eggs on the cypress, look very much like the tree’s leaves–and both endangered.

I hope they both make it.
2 comments
Comments feed for this article
April 6, 2022 at 6:31 am
Ayi Ariquater
Nice
LikeLike
April 6, 2022 at 9:31 pm
Erp
A diverse genus (or maybe more than one, the classifiers are arguing). The classical cypress is Cupressus sempervirens often associated with graveyards and mourning and gardens. Ovid has a story of a god turning a boy mourning for the death of his pet deer into a cypress.

Van Gogh liked painting them
LikeLike