#chestnut
#art #vangogh #chestnut
One of my favorites/
Blossoming Chestnut Branches was painted by Vincent van Gogh during the artist's Auvers-sur-Oise period in May 1890, the final year of his life.
- The painting was one of four missing after a high-profile theft from the Foundation E.G. Bührle gallery in Zürich on February 10, 2008. The work was found nine days later in a parked automobile in Zürich, along with one of the other stolen paintings, and was returned undamaged to the gallery.
Homestead Paradise: got barren land, boosted it at a profit
In the early 90s, Mark and Jen Shepard bought a degraded corn farm in Viola, Wisconsin, and began to slowly convert it from row-crops back to a native oak savanna that would become one of the most productive perennial farms in the country.
After 8 years of homesteading in Alaska (arriving just as the Homestead Act was expiring) where they had been forced by low-paying jobs to discover “which trees, shrubs, bushes, and vines we could get food from”, they arrived in the Driftless Area of Wisconsin ready to apply their knowledge of permaculture (“permanent agriculture”).
Over the past nearly three decades, Mark has planted an estimated 250,000 trees on the 106-acre farm. The main agroforestry crops are chestnuts, hazelnuts, and apples, followed by walnut, hickory, cherry, and pine (for the nuts). For short-term income, the couple planted annual crops, like grains and asparagus, in alleys between the fruit-and-nut-bearing trees. Cattle, pigs, lambs, turkeys, and chickens act as pest control and free composters as they roam the savannas of the farm.
Not content to rely on commercially-produced seeds, Mark does his own breeding to find the best-adapted trees to his region using the method he’s dubbed STUN (Sheer Total Utter Neglect). He plants trees at a higher density than recommended and with as much diversity as possible (at one point they were farming 219 varieties of apples) and then lets pests and disease run their course. He fells diseased trees or those that don’t bear enough, or early enough, fruit. The result is orchards hardy enough to survive even Chestnut Blight.
As more and more of the alley crops have been replaced with trees and pocket ponds to help manage water on the farm, the land here has returned to the native savannas where the mastodon once grazed 12,000 years ago (in 1898 bones were discovered 5 miles down the road).
New Forest Farm has inspired many other perennial farms, especially chestnut farmers in the region, and Mark hopes that every schoolchild will plant their own apple seeds (and perhaps subject them to STUN) and that every family can plant a backyard food forest.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRPP4Ilpxso
#Agriculture #USA #Wisconsin #Forest #trees #edible #chestnut #food #ecology
#Islamic #Art #IslamicCalligraphy #Sufi #Thuluth #Script #Gilded #Inscription #Horse #Chestnut #Leaf #Beauty #Turkey #Culture #History #Our #World
Natural Leaf with Calligraphy
Thuluth Script
Horse Chestnut Leaf - 20. x 8.9 cm.
9th century
Turkey
The gilded inscription within the fine net of a horse chestnut leaf says, "The best people are those who do good for other people," and reads from bottom to top. This painstaking art form preserved important cultural sayings for the Sufi sect. The technique, which involved stenciling the text and covering it with wax before laying the leaf on top, soaked in chemicals that ate away nearly everything but the vein structure, to reveal the writing. The writing was further outlined with piercing to remove still more of the leaf surface. The fineness of the leaf's filigree enhances the bold lines of the calligraphy, enhancing the stature of the words both as marks and as message.