A delicate, spacious watercolor landscape — four small trees distributed across a wide pale ground, the most arid and spare of all Sidney's landscapes. The ground is near-white throughout, with only the faintest tonal variations suggesting a flat, open terrain: a green line at the horizon, pale washes of ochre and gray indicating earth, a large gray-green cloud form at upper left.
The four trees are the composition's four events: at left, a small plant with purple flower marks; at center-left, the most fully described — a spiky branching tree in olive green, its individual leaf-marks rendered carefully, the branches reaching in multiple directions; at center, a taller slender plant form with the same botanical leaf vocabulary; at right, a compact cactus-like form in green with a suggestion of purple flowering.
Each tree has been given space — room between itself and the others, room to exist without competition. The composition is a study in individual botanical character: these four plants are not a forest or a grove but four specific individuals, each one distinct, each one given equal attention.
The pale ground connecting them reads as desert or dry plain — the landscape of the American Southwest, or the Italian Puglia (echoing the Olive Tree, Puglia painting), or any arid landscape where trees exist in isolation from each other, separated by the difficulty of the ground. Sidney recognized this as its own kind of landscape, spare and dignified.