{"id":175,"date":"2025-10-03T19:09:39","date_gmt":"2025-10-04T02:09:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/willowsongways.com\/wordpress\/?p=175"},"modified":"2026-08-20T17:43:18","modified_gmt":"2026-08-21T00:43:18","slug":"ng-perfoliate-alexander","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/willowsongways.com\/index.php\/2025\/10\/03\/ng-perfoliate-alexander\/","title":{"rendered":"Neurographic Perfoliate Alexander \u2013 Now That\u2019s a Mouthful!"},"content":{"rendered":"
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One summer several years ago, my family visited Bellevue, WA to attend a soccer tournament. While we were there, we had a chance to explore the beautiful Bellevue Botanical Garden. If you are ever in the area, this garden is definitely worth a visit.<\/p>\n

I took lots of plant pictures, and one of my favorites has long been what I believe to be Perfoliate Alexander (Smyrnium perfoliatum) surrounded by some little bell-shaped purple flowers. For years I\u2019ve had a printout of this picture floating around in my art inspiration folder. I once did a paper collage version of it that did not go well, but I still loved the photo and kept it in my stack for future work.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n

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As I mentioned in my previous post, I have recently been experimenting with incorporating neurographic art techniques into some of my work. Hmm, I thought, maybe using this would be the perfect solution for doing something with this photo. I first did a detailed pencil sketch of the main plant and went over this with my .005 Micron pen. Then I added a loose sketch of the purple flowers in pencil and returned to my pen to draw in a whole series of mostly random lines from the edges of the page to the edges of my central drawing, following the purple flower sketch lines whenever I intersected them. I went back over these lines again to fatten them up a little and add curves to all the crossing points. Then I took my watercolor pencils and colored it all in. The result isn\u2019t perfect but makes a nice journal entry and gives me a new reference to use for doing a full painting of it in the future. This page makes me smile whenever I look at it as it was both a pleasure to create and brings back memories of that enjoyable trip.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n

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And if you are a plant geek like me, an internet search that included iNaturalist, Kew Gardens, and pfaf.org sites yielded a few interesting facts about this plant.<\/p>\n

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  • It is a biennial that is part of the carrot family (Apiaceae)<\/li>\n
  • Its native range is eastern\/central Europe to the Mediterranean and Caucusus<\/li>\n
  • It blooms June\u2013August and its seeds ripen July\u2013September<\/li>\n
  • It is self-fertile and likes moist, well-drained soil and full sun but can tolerate partial shade<\/li>\n
  • The leaves and young shoots and stems are all edible either cooked or raw in salads. It is said to have a strong celery flavor and the seedlings can be used as a parsley substitute. The root can also be cooked and used in soups and the spicy seeds can be used like pepper.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    Who knew? I wish I could taste it. Aha! More searching just revealed that one of the seed companies I regularly order from has a different variety of Alexander (aka Black Lovage, also edible) that I might have to try someday.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    One summer several years ago, my family visited the beautiful Bellevue Botanical Garden where I of course took a lot of plant pictures. See how I combined one of my favorites, a lovely plant called Perfoliate Alexander, with neurographic art techniques to create a fun drawing in my nature journal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":859,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,16,17,15,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-abstract-fantasy","category-flowers","category-nature-journaling","category-plants","category-travel"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/willowsongways.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/willowsongways.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/willowsongways.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/willowsongways.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/willowsongways.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/willowsongways.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1197,"href":"https:\/\/willowsongways.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175\/revisions\/1197"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/willowsongways.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/859"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/willowsongways.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/willowsongways.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/willowsongways.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}