Jocelyn’s Books

An elderly lady with bright eyes and silver hair cut in a page-boy style smiling straight at the camera. She is wearing a blue knitted broad-roll-necked jumper.
Jocelyn Campbell.
A book-cover featuring a large pencil-drawn illustration of a rough bank in front of a small rock cliff, which has at its top a row of trees of different species. The handwritten caption reads: Aspens at Cotterby Scar, Keld. Above the image is the book title: Trees in the Swaledale Landscape. Below the image is the author's name: Jocelyn Campbell.
Cover of Trees in the Landscape (SWAAG, 2013).
A book-cover showing edge-to-edge a watercolour painting of the trunks of two large trees growing on the far side of a dry-stone wall. There is an impression of the tree canopies of a dappled mixture of pale-green and dark-green leaves. A smaller, bush-like tree is in the distance on the right. In front of the wall is a carpet of blue, white, and yellow wild flowers and grasses. Overlying the image at the top is the book title on two lines: A Yorkshire Guide The Flowers of Swaledale. Overlying the foot of the image is the author's name: Jocelyn Campbell.
Cover of The Flowers of Swaledale (Hayloft, 2014).

SWAAG member the late Jocelyn Campbell combined her love for the trees and flowers of the dales with her exceptional talents as an artist to produce two published pictorial studies.

A pencil drawing, portrait-shaped, of a mature tree in winter, with bare branches. It stands immediately behind a stone wall, the top of which forms the base of the picture. Behind the tree and to the left is a glimpse of a church building. The hand-written caption reads: St Mary's Arkengarthdale, Beech tree. The tree trunk has divided into three equally substantially parts, perhaps about two metres from the ground. There is a tangled mass of branches extending in all directions from the crown of the tree.
Beech tree in St Mary’s churchyard, Arkengarthdale, from Trees in the Swaledale Landscape, by Jocelyn Campbell.

The first, Trees in the Swaledale Landscape (SWAAG, 2013) is a major collection of 261 pencil sketches, with accompanying text by SWAAG president Tim Laurie.

It can be purchased as a print-on-demand book by visiting the Books menu of this website, or by clicking here: Books.

Tim’s introduction noted that the drawings were Jocelyn’s selection of the more-characteristic trees to be seen in the Swaledale landscape at localities representative of the limestone scars, the waterfall ravines, the becks, riverbanks, and dale-sides.

A watercolour painting of a specimen single-stem wild plant with four flowers, each with five petals coloured yellow with red splotches. The dark-green leaves are broad with serrated edges curving to a point.
Yellow Monkey Flower, Blood-drop Emlets, or Monkey Musk, otherwise Mimulus Luteus, from The Flowers of Swaledale, by Jocelyn Campbell.

The second, The Flowers of Swaledale (Hayloft, 2014) is an equally magnificent collection of 148 full-page watercolours created by Jocelyn. Although now out of print, used copies are available from second-hand book sellers.

In her introduction to the book, Jocelyn wrote that the intention of her work, visualised through the eye of the artist, not a botanist, was to help people who visit or live in Swaledale and Arkengarthdale to identify some of the diverse wildflowers that grow there.

She noted especially the abundance of wildflowers among the grasses of the hay meadows that produce a tapestry of colour each summer.