When Don Lindgren* saw my drawing of Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens in July, he asked me to create drawings for his presentation at the 2017 Symposium of Food and Cookery in Oxford UK. He envisioned simple line drawings to help illustrate “ingredient mapping” process used to study antique cookbooks.

Happily diving into the project, I visited Strawbery Banke in Portsmouth NH and Laudholm and Spiller Farms in Wells ME for inspiration, and put my pencil to paper.

These drawings were included in his award-winning presentation and paper “Food & Landscape, Steps Toward an Ecology of the Cookbook: Landscape in the Cookbook and the Cookbook in its Landscape.”

From the experience, I discovered that I like drawing as much as I like photographing. In August, I moved into Running with Scissors Artist Studios with sharpened Toison D’Or 8B pencil in hand.

*Don Lindgren is a rare bookseller, appraiser and cataloger of literary and artistic archives of significance, and founder with his wife Samantha Hoyt Lindgren of Rabelais Fine Books on Food & Drink. He serves on the Board of Governors of Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America, a member of the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers, the Ephemera Society of America, and the Wayward Tendrils.