Solitary Soul by Anindya Majumdar, India
Glacier by Carlotta Maitland Smith, England
Trees, rocks and a red dune provide incredible contrast in the Namib desert, 2009
The tulip has become synonymous with the Netherlands. Tourists from around the world visit the country just to see the bright colored flower and the astonishing view over the flower fields.
The small Dutch town called Keukenhof is considered the world's largest flower garden. According to the Keukenhof Park officials, approximately seven million flower bulbs are planted annually in the park. During an eight week Tulip festival 800,000 people come to see the Garden of Europe which is one of the most photographed sights in the world.
Netherland owes its tulip heritage to the Ottoman Empire. The Tulip was originally a wild flower, growing in Central Asia. It was first cultivated by the Turks as early as 1000 AD.
In the Ottoman Empire, tulips played such an important role that the reign of Sultan Ahmed III (1703-1730) has been labeled the "Tulip Era". Three hundred years before Dutch and British horticulture societies got together to propose the first classified list of tulip names, Turkish florist-in-chief in Sultan's court was heading a council to judge new cultivars of tulips and was giving them fanciful and poetic names; some examples are: "Those that burn the heart", "Matchless Pearl", "Rose of colored Glass", "Increaser of Joy", "Big Scarlet", "Star of Felicity", "Diamond Envy", or "Light of the Mind". Only the most flawless cultivars were entered into the official tulip list. The Turkish florist standards preferred only tall thin tulips, narrowly contoured and made up of dagger-shaped petals. The petals had to be smooth, stiff, of one color, the exact size and length, petals of narrow pointed tips, and with no gaps.
At the end of the 16th century the tulip arrived in the Netherlands and immediately became very popular among the upper classes. The word Tulip is derived from the Turkish word for turban "tulbent". It is difficult to establish the exact date of the first cultivations of tulips in the Netherlands, but it is generally admitted that around 1550 the bulbs reached the country on ships arriving from Istanbul.
The first documented flowering of tulips was in 1594, in the Hortus Botanicus (Botanical garden) of the University of Leiden. The bulbs were brought to the university garden from Vienna by Carolus Clusius, previously responsible for the Imperial Garden in Vienna. At that time Austria was under Turkish cultural influence, expressing itself among others in the oriental fashion and the new habit of drinking coffee.
As the Netherlands went through a period of unprecedented economic boom in the first half of the 17th century, competition among growers started, who will have the most beautiful tulip. People were ready to pay extraordinary sums of money for a single bulb. It seemed that if they would have carefully cultivated their tulips they could have never lost, getting more and of precious bulbs, while the prices rose constantly. Slowly the intense speculation started and batches of some rare bulbs had a higher price than a house and were growing in value. In 1635, a set of 40 bulbs has been sold for 100,000 florins while a medium yearly income in the Netherlands at the time was 150 florins.
In 1636, stock exchanges were established to trade in bulbs and their future options. Despite the different attempts by the authorities to limit the craze, the trade grew and people were selling land, houses and valuable objects to invest in tulip bulbs. The most famous bulbs as Viceroy or Semper Augustus were priced at thousands of florins. The Dutch called this phenomena themselves ironically a windhandel (trading in wind). Indeed, in 1637 the market crashed, leaving some traders enriched, but most of the public with just some pretty flowers.
Today, the tulip mania, tulipomania or tulip madness is used as a term for any economically absurd group craze where speculation borders with senseless gambling. The Dutch, although a bit ashamed of their own past behavior, still love tulips.
Allah shows us different miracles in our everyday life. Read this story and see how complex his creation is:It flutters across a hillside in Somerset – the lovely blue butterfly that came back from the dead. And the man who brought it back is watching, celebrating 25 years of its resurrection.
The return of the large blue, which went extinct in Britain in 1979, is one of the great conservation success stories, and the 25th anniversary of its reintroduction is being celebrated today at Montacute House, the Somerset stately home in the heart of large blue country, by Britain's leading conservationists, headed by Sir David Attenborough.
What they will be celebrating, in fact, is the work of Jeremy Thomas, Britain's leading butterfly expert, who discovered the way to bring back a creature which has the most astonishing life cycle of any British insect – it spends most of its life as a caterpillar inside an ants' nest, and without the ants, it cannot turn into a butterfly.
As a young researcher, Professor Thomas, as he now is, discovered which species of red ant has this relationship with the large blue (and there is only one) and then worked out how to keep the ant colonies flourishing. It was a question of having the grassland where they lived grazed very short, so it would remain warmed by the sun. If the grass was only a few centimetres too long, the ants would disappear, and with it, the butterflies.
Historically, rabbits had kept the grass short, but in the mid-1950s rabbit populations were suddenly devastated by the plague-like disease myxomatosis. On many large blue sites, the turf grew too long and the butterfly began rapidly to die out – although no one had any idea why.
It took Jeremy Thomas six summers of work on the very last of the large blue sites, on the edge of Dartmoor, from 1972 to 1977, to unravel the chain of events which was leading to the rapid demise of one of Britain's most beautiful wildlife species.
He was just too late to save it. But the knowledge to bring it back and keep it was now in place; and in 1983, working with another butterfly conservationist, David Simcox, he brought large blue caterpillars from Sweden and released them on the Dartmoor site; they emerged as adult insects the following summer.
According to tree experts from Fauna & Flora International, around 90% of the fruit and nut forests of central Asia have been destroyed over the past 50 years alone
Some of the rarest and most beautiful and exotic succulents in the world come from Somalia. And two of the absolute rarest plants are found around these two Somali towns and bear their names. The first is Pseudolithos eylensis and the second is Pseudolithos harardheranus. Its name coming from the Greek pseudo, meaning “false,” and lithos, meaning “stone,” for the appearance of the stems, pseudolithos constitute some of the most succulent species among the Stapeliads, with the tessellation of the stem’s surface being a characteristic hallmark of the genus. These plants are also among the most prized of all succulents by collectors worldwide.
