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monstersandmaw · 4 years

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Wow, here we are at the end of Mermay 2020! Welcome to those of you who've joined either for or during Mermay! It's lovely to have you along.

I've written a total of 35,390 words for you just with these five Mermay stories alone! Thank you for your comments, and I hope you've enjoyed them, and I hope you are looking forward to June. As I've said before, I've taken what Patrons said to me in the feedback form into account, and I'm hoping to bring in some of that from next month!

Next up though is a short part two to ooze boy Tokis' story, as selected by the person who got the thank you story for filling in the feedback form.

Anyway, here's my last Mermay offering for you, and it's a long'un!

Contents: female reader (though that only comes up at the nsfw bit at the end), an older, gruff male selkie with a reputation for being frightening, and some bit-parts including an old harpy, some fluffy satyrs, and an extra fluffy minotaur. Nsfw content (because someone asked for more info on this before we get going): kissing, vaginal fingering, reader receiving oral, hand job, very very minor come-play...) Words: 7938

Chunky preview:

“Weather’s getting worse,” the old harpy croaked as you shouldered your bag and prepared to head home a little earlier that day.

“I’ll be careful,” you smiled.

Grenna ruffled her wings and snorted. “I can feel it in my feathers, child,” she said. “You go straight home. Don’t you stop off at that fairy pool and talk to the frogs all afternoon, you hear me? You get home to your family.”

Your already fond smile stretched wider. She knew you too well.

The mountain air was thin and fresh this high up, and as you practically skipped through the wide stone streets of the trading town, you revelled in the way the sunlight flashed on the dark golden stones of the buildings hunkered down in the natural hollow of the hillside. Centuries ago, it had once been nothing more than a collection of sheepherders’ huts, but as the trade between the nations had flourished, it had grown and grown until it had become the bustling market hub it was today, along the wide, winding road between neighbouring kingdoms.

Although peace had settled like a luxuriating housecat between the two nations, the town guard had eventually formed to protect the interests of the merchants and hauliers, and it had attracted some of the best soldiers from across both kingdoms. Dotted here and there throughout the steep, winding streets, they usually greeted passers by with nods or gruff good mornings, but never Galar.

He was one that the townsfolk feared; whose name mothers would hiss in frustration at their misbehaving children, only to find those children rapidly coming to heel, afraid of the guard with the eyes that shone like blood in certain lights and who had once - it was said - thrown a centaur right off the parapet of the town walls on the eastern side of the town where the valley careened away into a rocky gorge. You’d never actually met him, but everyone knew his name and what he looked like, and what his reputation for violence was.

No one seemed to know what he was though. If the centaur story was anything to go by, it was plain he couldn't be a mere human, though he looked it for the most part. Some suspected he was a lycan, though the small guild of werewolves in the town swore up and down he wasn’t one of them. He couldn’t be a vampire, despite the reddish eyes, because he could often be seen standing sentry at the main gates in full sun, apparently not bothered in the least by the weight and heat of his plate and mail guard’s armour. His ears weren’t pointed - in fact they were gnarled and bashed, like the cauliflower ears of fighters in the gladiatorial rings up north - so he was unlikely to be some kind of Fae.

You’d always entertained the notion that perhaps he was one of the elusive werebears said to populate the forests of the west, but it wasn’t as if you knew much about anything beyond the textiles that Grenna and you sold in the market place and from her little shop around the corner from the barracks. The old harpy had grown fond of you in a grandmotherly way, and had even sponsored you to apprentice for a tailor and dressmaker up in the exclusive Fountain District. With an apprenticeship with Alivia Silverscale under your belt, you could have gone to work for almost any dressmaker in the capital, but you had no grand designs for a career amid the wealthiest nobles in the city. You didn’t even like living in the small town of Drumcarrick so the idea of moving to the heave and bustle of a proper city made you shudder. Sewing costumes for the Merchants’ Guild Summer Ball was probably the highlight of your working year though.

Trotting down the hill and stepping out through the protective bulwark of the town gates, the icy blast of the spring wind caught you full in the face and you almost laughed. Free as a condor, you passed under the wide arch, smiling at one of the guards who watched you go, and headed out along the flagstone road.

It wasn’t long before you reached the lone, thunder-blasted tree that marked an old sheep track leading up through the rocks, and you scrambled up it and paused halfway up to catch your breath. Leaning against a boulder, you turned to look out over the valley that lay beneath you in a dizzying tableau of greens and blues and greys. Your breath caught as you saw storm clouds roiling at the far end of the steep-sided mountain pass. The weather here was not something to be trifled with or ignored, and you guessed you had perhaps an hour before the rain would hit.

For now, the slopes of the rocky mountains were bathed in brilliant sunshine, and as you scampered up the hillside, scattering the odd startled wild sheep with a chuckling apology, you knew there was nowhere else in the world you’d rather be.

The old ‘fairy pond’ that Grenna had warned you not to go to lay nestled in a small crook of rock about halfway up between Drumcarrick and the cloud-crowned mountain peak, and it was only fifteen minutes or so out of your way back to the cave home where you’d been born and where you now lived with a small family of bighorn satyrs. Most people who were not native to the area thought of caves as dark and dank, with dripping, algae-slimed walls and cold, stale air, but yours was nothing like that.

People had lived in homes like yours for generations up here, with stone outer walls built across the gaping maws of ancient caves, caulked with moss and rendered on the inside with clay to keep the drafts out and the warmth in, and on the inside they were decorated with wooden floorboards and thick, sheep wool rugs. A huge hearth had been built into the rock at the centre of the long narrow space, and a chimney drilled out of the rock and capped with a metal cover to keep the animals and the weather out. It was the loveliest place on earth, except perhaps for the fairy pond.

Legend had it that the tiny, deep pool had once been a kelpie’s home, but if it had, none lived there now. It plunged unknowably deep, its waters mirror-dark, though it was perhaps only fifty decent strides around its circumference, ringed around with meadowsweet and sedges, marsh marigold and water crowfoot. However, as you made your way towards it that day, heading up towards the narrow cleft in a boulder that then led to the small pool, a huge figure loomed out of the rocks right in front of you and came to a sudden halt, towering over you.

You shrieked, more out of surprise at finding someone else there than anything else, and toppled backwards, staggering and scrambling, desperate not to lose your footing and go tumbling down the hillside like a stray stone idly kicked. A massive hand shot out and grabbed your arm, yanking you right off your feet but stopping you from falling.

Turning your eyes to the face of your rescuer, you gasped. Scar-flecked as an old battle axe, and twice as strong, the figure still holding you aloft like a dangling puppy had to be Galar. His eyes weren’t the demonic, scarlet red they’d been painted by town folklore and gossip, but were in fact an extremely rich, warm brown, flecked with copper highlights. The moment he realised you were staring at him, his rough hand let go of you and you dropped to land awkwardly on your feet on the steep, narrow path in front of him.

“Sorry,” you laughed once you’d found your balance. “And thank you. You startled the life out of me. I… I thought I was the only one who came here.”

Without a word, he pushed past you, sending you staggering back against a nearby rock, and you watched him stump down the path back towards the town. A silvery animal skin lay draped across his broad shoulders, the same hue as his salt and pepper hair. Galar was clean-shaven, but seemed to have a heavy shadow around his rough-hewn, anvil jaw, and the brows which lowered over his russet-brown eyes were thick and scowling, also sprinkled with a silvery grey. He looked to be in his early forties, if you were measuring him by human standards, and with his rough-hewn features, dark skin, and immense strength, you were surprised to find that Galar didn’t look like the monster he’d been made out to be at all. In fact, he was rather attractive.

In the wake of his departure, you simply stood there, dumb and motionless as the rocks all around you, until finally you shivered and looked up to see the first drops of rain spattering down on the sun-warmed rocks below. The water of the fairy pool behind you churned softly, as though still lamenting the absence of a recent bather, but you decided against taking an icy bath that day.

Skittering back down the path, racing the rain, you ran for home.

Read the whole thing right now, as well as the Mermay 2020 posts (five in total, including extra artwork) and a surprise, nsfw ‘ghost lover’ story, plus everything that’s been posted already on Patreon!

#exophilia #mermay #selkie #leopard seal selkie #slightly older character #male monster #female reader

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anne-lister-adventures · 4 years

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Wednesday, 12 February 1840

8 10/’’

12 1/2

Fine morning Reaumur 9 1/2º at 9 a.m. all packed and ready at breakfast at 9 50/’’ – Before we had finished breakfast the Prince de Georgie came and perhaps 1/2 hour afterwards Monsieur and Madame Krukoff and sat with us till 11 1/2 – Very civil and agreeable – The Prince de G-[Georgie] gave us marche route of winter Stations along the river 83 v.[versts] from here to his village of Listova where we are to sleep – A person will meet us at the last Station and conduct us to chez le Prince –

Talked in merited praise of Russia and Nijni – Told briefly the story of my ascent of Mt. Perdu adding there was no gîte in Russia so bad as that at the ft.[foot] of Mt. P-[Perdu] (Gollis) – 21 hours on foot the day of ascending till arriving at Torla at 7 a.m. the same day –

Wrote the above of today till now 11 35/’’ – Sent George at 11 20/’’ (while they were all here) with my letter to Countess A.[Alexandrine] P-[Panin] ‘À Madame La Comtesse Alexandrine Panin’ under cover to ‘À Monsieur Monsieur Baehr de la part de Madame Lister de Shibden avec bien des complimens’ – And the Prince de Georgie (Gurinsky) directed my letter to the Princess Oroussoff Rue des Jardins Dans sa Maison à Moscow, and I gave him the letter to put into the post – Letters come from St. P-[Petersburg] here in 5 days –

Capital place this for communication avec tout l’Empire – Very nice liveable town – Nice little society – Very much pleased with Nijni and flattered by all the attentions we have received – Then settling paying busy over 1 thing or other till now 12 3/4 –Tthen had to wait impatiently and doing nothing, for horses till off at 1 25/’’ – We had really been very comfortable, three rooms for ourselves and little rooms and a little kitchen for the servants at 12/- per day – paid 4 days = 48/- + 1/20 for the cream we had had – Nothing more – Neither given to servants, nor on any other account –

Just before coming away the Prince de Georgie sent his servant with a nice large square loaf of gingerbread as a parting present – How good and civil of him – And he has sent a man off to his Country House 83 v.[versts] to have all ready for us tonight! –

No view of N-[Nizhny] looking back – Went along wide birch-bordered road over high ground till steep descent (in 3/4 hour) down upon a village at the level or thereabouts of the river – Drove thro’ this picturesque little village and in about 1/4 hour more (an hour from N-[Nizhny]) or sooner? (difficult to say the snow makes all so alike) – At the river, and drive for the rest of our day’s journey along and under its high right bank – Islands covered with sallies and occasionally red willow and sedge grass here and there peeping above the snow – The bank left flat, and low, and more or less wooded steep, and high, often like the scarped mound of a fortification, right, with here and there abrupt breaks (rents) and little headlands and wood and villages, and churches in long line along the arrête (the brink) very picturesque – The low ground close to the water’s edge on both sides covered with sallies, of which the people make hurdle inclosures – A parcel of them near our 1st village looked in the distance like cattle furs – Probably little gardens? –

Turn up one of the little steep rents, and at 5 Ketovo on the ridge – On the brink of the river – At 3 17/’’ picturesque village good neat church belongs to Government – Row of wells in the wide street – Covered over with square pointed low wood roofs – Picturesque – The village close above the river –

Off at 3 35/’’ descend down another steep rent to the water’s edge – Impossible to write while we are going on account of the motion and occasional big jolts – Could not more than necessary at Ketovo, too cold – My fingers began to ache – No birds but Royston crows and jackdaws and sparrows – Reaumur -14º in the doorway of our Kibitka lying on my Chelat as we sat in the village at 3 17/’’ changing horses –

25.[versts] Ketovo to Kadnitzi from 3 35/’’ to 5 25/’’ Good, very picturesque, up-hill-creeping narrowed streeted village very picturesque belonging to Sheremetieff (the S-[Sheremetieff] of Moscow I suppose – He has 150,000 peasants) one or 2 fine-looking men at the post as we changed horses in 1/4 hour –

25.[versts] Kadnitzi to Archino from 5 40/’’ to 7 1/2 – Fine moon, but too cold to stare about very much - Besides, I had broken the window on my side in the commodity-rummage after leaving Ketovo (about 4 p.m.) and I had afterwards in trying to rub clean the front window for a peep-out bracked the glass of that too, and the jolting soon brought the piece out, so that our Kibitka profited by the cold –

Pass several large wooded islands in the river and drive close under the shipping of several little frozen up ports – All under the right bank – Merely a mast and hull here and there to be seen nearer the middle of the stream and towards the left bank – I think the tolerably good young wood of some of the islands might be oak of clean growth of perhaps 50 or 60 years or occasionally rather more? – Around some of the islands there was the appearance of a band of red a red hedge (of red willows) –

12.[versts] Archino to Luiskova (the village of our host the Prince of G-[Georgia]) from 7 50/’’ to 9 – Soon after leaving A-[Archino] broke our Limonière, but had another with us, and all right again in about 1/4 hour or less – At A-[Archino] one of the Prince of G-‘s[Georgia’s] people was waiting and chargé d’un billet très poli de la part du Prince –

Found all comfortable and ready on our arrival – A large good room Rez de Chaussée – Sofas – Mattresses – Everything – And very nicely warm about 13 1/2º to 14º - Excellent tea, and bread and butter and little cakes arranged on a napkinned tray – Gross long in getting all we wanted out of the carriages – Had Domna at 11 – Too sleepy to write – Very fine day –

Some of Anne’s and Ann’s stops from Nizhny Novgorod to Lyskovo.

[symbols in the margin of the page:] N

[in the margin of the page:] Leave Nijni Novgorod

[in the margin of the page:] 5 Nijny to Ketovo 21 v.[versts]

[in the margin of the page:] Reaumur -14º

Page References: SH:7/ML/E/24/0012 and SH:7/ML/E/24/0013

#anne lister code breaker #anne lister #ann walker #moscow to baku 1840

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zen-garden-gnome · 4 years

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Understanding Soil Basics

Some recent, introductory horticulture projects have brought my attention to the regenerative nature of ecosystems. One of the most basic and important aspects of plant cultivation is the health of the soil. Good soil is alive, an ecosystem unto itself. Industrial agriculture (and plenty of horticulture) functions with a narrow and exploitative understanding/prioritization of the soil ecosystem--a holdover of colonialism, now built into capitalism, excused out of desperation. Our reliance on synthetic fertilizers, destructive tilling practices, excessive pesticides/herbicides/fungicides, monoculture “efficiency,” and deforestation (for more monocultures!) has resulted in abysmal global soil quantity and fertility levels, largely related to loss of biodiversity in and around the soil ecosystem. Now climate and agriculture experts predict our soils can produce approximately 60 more harvests. Speaking of which, check this out:

So I’m learning about soil. Not just because I’ll need to in order to help a community enjoy food security, but also because... I dunno, I just really like it. Putting my fingers in some dirt feels good and right. Currently I’m reading The Ultimate Guide to Soil by Anna Hes, and I’m summarizing important content as I go back and review sections (especially stuff I know I’ll want to reference later). Rewriting it helps me remember it, so I’ll be dumping that stuff here. along with any extra research I wind up doing in the process. As I work my way through the sections of the book, I’ll make more posts!

First up: Understanding Soil Basics...

Healthy soil is dark with humus. Humus is stable organic matter that’s decomposed into a mix of waxes and lignins, held together by microbial gums and starches, and loaded with nitrogen. Humus bonds readily to heavy metals and excess elements/nutrients, too, thus improving food safety. Organic decomposition into humus even increases carbon dioxide near the soil’s surface, which stimulates plant growth.

“Wild” plant growth can reveal aspects of soil health. Since weeds often thrive in low-nutrient soils and are less susceptible to diseases and pests (since they grew based on what was appropriate for the soil/area), observing them may make it easier to filter out non soil-related variables in overall garden health/output. Of course, these correlations tend to be region-specific and don’t indicate much by themselves. Regular tending is the best prevention, but some general weed-to-soil conditions are as follows:

Nitrogen-fixing plants thrive in low-fertility soil (legumes, dandelions, nettles, comfrey, horsetails, watercress, parsley, plantains, chamomile, chickweed, autumn olives, alders, temperate list here).

Sedges (Cyperaseae grass-like flowering plants with triangular cross-stems) and rushes (Juncaceae grass-like erect stems with tufted tops) thrive in wet, waterlogged soil.

Mosses thrive in damp, shady, compacted, low-fertility/nutrient, and/or acidic soil (pH < 7).

Pfeiffer (found reliable) claims acidic soils (pH < 7) are often linked to poor drainage and tend to grow sorrels, docks, fingerleaf weeds, lady’s thumb, horsetail, hawkweed, and knapweed.

Pfeiffer claims crusted or hardpan soils tend to grow field mustard, horse nettle, penny cress, morning glory, quackgrass, chamomile, and pineapple weed.

Pfeiffer claims overcultivated soils with excess nitrogen tend to grow lamb’s quarter, plantain, chickweed, buttercup, dandelion, nettle, prostrate knotweed, prickly lettuce, field speedwell, rough pigweed, common horeground, celandine, mallow, carpetweed, and thistles.

Soil order relates to the origins of a region’s soil:

*It seems notable that the author focuses on a soil region’s “agricultural” use. A soil’s agricultural value doesn’t necessarily relate to its cultivation prospects. On the contrary, if Oxisols in Hawai’i and Puerto Rico can support indigenous cultures and hosts of wildlife with lush year-round vegetation, then perhaps agriculture isn’t the most reasonable, sustainable, or appropriate means of obtaining food from the land.

Note, regional soil is more than just regional bedrock. It also contains naturally and unnaturally imported soils, like sand used for human developments sand or windblown silt (loess).

Dominant soil order map (as seen below)

Soil order images (as seen below)

All USDA soil data/maps

Soil texture relates to the various sizes and types of particles in a soil sample. The three soil particle types are clay (smallest), silt (mid-size), and sand (largest).

Sandy soils can be useful for early growth and for root veggies that excel at pushing through tough earth, but water flushes through too quickly to maintain hydration, and big dry pores make it easy for microbes to churn too quickly through organic matter additives, leaving no time for humus to form. Try no-till gardening in sandy soils and add heavy mulches and bio-char. In areas with droughted, sandy soil, try sunken pit gardens.

Clay soils have small particles and therefore small pores, causing a tendency to drain poorly and clump up when worked too wet or too dry. However, the small particles bond readily to nutrients better than do sand or silt. Clay gardens can be quite productive, albeit damp and heavy. Adding organic matter helps create larger aggregates and therefore more pore variety, thus improving air and water circulation. Try raised beds.

Silt soils can appear similar to clay soils on the microscopic level, and their medium particle size has its benefits. However, silt soils aren’t sticky like clay, so erosion is often an issue. Utilize cover crops and/or mulch.

Loamy soils are the ideal texture because they contain relatively balanced quantities of the three particle types. Adding compost, mulch, and cover crops to sandy, clayey, or silty soils improves diversity of particle, aggregate, and pore sizes; increases overall water retention while providing balanced aeration; creates balanced microbial activity; and provides nutrients. Simply blending the 3 soils textures together does not yield the same results and is a resource-intensive process.

(Check out comparisons here.)

Moistening and manipulating the soil makes it easier to identify. In the ribbon test outlined below by the Australian Department of Primary Industries, if a ribbon is unable to form then soil contents are sand or loamy sand. If the ribbon is less than an inch, its contents are loam, silt, silt loam, or sandy loam. If the ribbon is 1 to 2 inches, it’s sandy clay loam, silty clay loam, or clay loam. If the ribbon makes it up to 2 or more, it’s made of sandy clay, silty clay, or clay.

To perform a jar test, pour one-part soil and two-parts water in a clear jar. Separate aggregates by lidding and shaking vigorously, before allowing the particles to settle at the bottom for at least 24hrs. The largest, heaviest particles are sand and will sink to the bottom. Small, light clay particles remain at the top, while silt rests in the middle.

Measure the thickness of each layer and calculate the percentage of sand, silt, and clay using a soil triangle (or enter calculations here).

Online soil surveys like https://websoilsurvey.sc.egov.usda.gov/App/HomePage.htm are also available.

Soil aggregates clump together as soil particles (waxes, minerals, lignins) interact with the weather, organisms, and each other. Soil aggregates vary in size depending on their circumstances. A sandy texture of mostly uniform aggregates suggests the soil sample consists primarily of its original mineral particles. It lacks organic content, including vegetal, fungal, insect, and microbial activity. Without this variety of shapes, sizes, pores, or biological activity, the particles don’t hold moisture and provide no avenues for soakage. Meanwhile, a chunky texture with large aggregates, hard clods, and/or a thick crust suggest soil compaction, again resulting in a loss of bio-pores. These issues are often man-made, resulting from excessive tilling, or from tilling/harvesting/planting in wet/dry soil, all of which break down natural soil aggregates. A healthy soil texture contains a variety of aggregate sizes, thus supporting a variety of pores. Ideally, good soil texture no longer requires tilling for the purposes of artificial pores. The best solutions are to increase organic matter, especially compost; introduce cover crops to create pores, attract biological activity, hold moisture, and prevent leaching/erosion; and reduce tilling.

Soil color reveals clues about soil health, too. Heavy rainfall soaks through paling topsoil and pulls clay and nutrients into the darkening subsoil. This separation of soils may call for a season of deep-rooted cover crops to bring nutrients back to the surface, hold soils together, and add organic matter. Grey or whitish soil (gley) in waterlogged areas indicates soils high in iron. The loss of oxygen leaves iron colorless and soil color visible. Patchwork grey and brown suggests waterlogging during part of the year which has now drained and regained some color. (Note, anaerobic activity releases hydrogen sulfide for a tell-tale swampy odor. Mounding up soil can help in waterlogged areas. Try a percolation test, first.)

While loamy soils are dark with humus, soil color is also heavily affected by mineral content:

Know your minerals. Iron oxides, sodium, and calcium can disrupt soil structure or kill plants outright.

Professional soil tests may be necessary if learning about and adapting to your soil doesn’t seem to increase fertility. All testing centers have their own requirements for collecting and sending samples, and not all labs offer the same types of tests. Unfortunately, most soil tests don’t look for heavy metals like arsenic, cadmium, copper, lead, nickel, selenium, or zinc. But this one does!

Soil pH describes a measure of potential (/power/percentage) concentration of hydrogen ions in a sample. The higher the number on a scale of 0.0 to 14.0, the fewer number of hydrogen ions available in the soil. Soils with a pH under 7.0 are have more hydrogen ions, making them acidic or “sour.” Soils with a pH over 7.0 have fewer hydrogen ions, making them alkaline, “basic,” or “sweet.” (Note, while a soil pH of 7.0 is considered neutral, a slightly acidic range from 6.0 to 7.0 is considered ideal for most garden soils.) Hydrogen concentration affects the mobility and availability of nutrients to plants and the structure of the soil itself due to the interactions between mostly negatively charged soil particles (anions) and mostly positively charged nutrient particles (cations). (Note, not all soil ions are anions and not all nutrient ions are cations, but many of the most important nutrients like calcium, magnesium, potassium, and hydrogen are cations.)

Cation-exchange capacity (CEC) is the amount of positive charge (most major nutrients) that can be exchanged per mass of soil. Specifically, the CEC of a soil sample measures how many nutrients can be retained on soil particle surfaces. CEC levels are higher in soils rich in organic matter and clay because these negatively charged particles have more surface area to attract positively charged nutrients. Therefore, CEC levels also indicate the soil’s quantity of negatively charged ions. Soils with a low CEC are low in organic matter and clay, and therefore nutrients won’t readily magnetize to the soil particles, leaving them to leach away from plant roots whenever water passes through. Furthermore, different nutrients have different quantities of protons and electrons and thus different bond strengths. With its neutral charge, hydrogen has the lowest cation, and so it tends to bond with soils only if there aren’t enough other cations available. Higher hydrogen bonds means there aren’t enough other cations bonding with the soil anions, resulting in lower pH and higher acidity. Ideally, hydrogen only fills “excess” bonds and otherwise moves freely in the water. For example, adding lime (calcium carbonate) to soil introduces more calcium, which has a stronger charge and thus can knock hydrogen ions loose from soil particles. Loosed hydrogen bonds with the carbon in the lime, producing H2O and CO2, which washes readily out of the soil and leaves it more alkaline than before.

Organic matter is a vital part of healthy, fertile soil. Diseases, fungi, poor water retention, and even pests are less likely to cause problems in healthy, living soils rich in decomposing organic matter. While small/weak plants can often be attributed to low nitrogen or improper pH, both issues tend to be caused by a paucity of organic matter. Nitrogen gets used up/washed away in the dirt quickly, but decomposing matter releases nitrogen constantly, slowly and steadily feeding plants and microbes alike. Soils need only be composed of around 5% organic matter to produce around 100lbs of available nitrogen per acre, per year. Perfect for veggie gardens.

Organic matter breaks down faster in hot, sandy soils, so it’s harder to sustain healthy levels and may require more. Organic matter is so active in cooler climates that the slower decomposition produces less nitrogen, and so faster-acting nitrogen amendments (diluted urine, compost tea, etc) may be necessary.

While soil’s cation exchange capacity only concerns positively-charged nutrient ions, the organic matter used to increase these nutrients will also improve soil’s ability to attain and hold onto negatively charged nutrient particles, too. Good soils have a CEC of at least 11 mEq/100 g. A milliequivalent is 1/1000th an equivalent, which is the measurement of the number of ions needed to total a specific quantity of electrical charges in another substance (100 grams of soil). These CEC levels may be difficult to attain, as they’re affected by ratios of passive, slow, and active organic matter:

Passive organic matter is very stable and takes a long time to decompose, sometimes hundreds or thousands of years. This includes the “browns” in compost, like the cellulose, lignin, and even charcoal of woody debris. Fungi and bacteria convert these into the humic substances in humus. Lingering passive organic matter affects texture and helps the soil water nutrients and prevent nutrient leaching, making it vital for maintaining CEC levels. Tough-stemmed cover crops are helpful.

Slow organic matter includes finely divided plant tissues high in lignin and other materials that take decades to decompose. These provide “slow-release” nitrogen and other nutrients, and feed the soil microbes that affect the breakdown of active organic matter.

Active organic matter breaks down readily into nitrogen and other nutrients. This includes the “greens” in compost, which provide sugar, starches, and proteins. They have high carbon-to-nitrogen ratios and break down within a few months to a few years. Decomposition of active organic matter also feeds the microbes that help determine aggregate variability and therefore soil texture. AOM includes living biomass, detritus, most of the polysaccharides, non-humic substances, and the more readily decomposed fulvic acid.

Sustainable soil amendments of organic matter (especially nitrogen) essentially run in two phases: development and maintenance. Development consists of adding large quantities of slow-acting organic matter, including burying logs and other organic debris; extensive cover cropping for the added biology, interactivity, and green compost; and at least an inch of compost before every planting. Depending on soil conditions at the outset, it can take anywhere from 2 to 10 years to reach the maintenance stage. At this point, maintaining around 5% organic matter in the soil just requires adding enough to replace whatever’s lost to decomposition each year—that is, approximately 2,000lbs (one cubic yard) per acre. A well-planned garden can eliminate wasteful amendments around low feeders (beans, peas) and ensure greater quantities for heavy feeders (squashes, tomatoes, garlic, bananas). Whew! This post may be updated as I amend relevant info for my own records.

#soil #reference #agriculture #horticulture #gardening #permaculture #zgg

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myperuguide · 5 years

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Puno: Planning a Journey to the Altiplano

Known as the folk capital of Peru, Puno is also mainly known by travelers for Titicaca Lake, the highest navigable lake in the world. This region was originally occupied by the Pucara and Tiahuanaco civilizations more than 1000 years ago, and it is believed that the founders of the Inca civilization came from this area after the decline of the Tiahuanacos. Puno is also a multicultural region where locals speak Spanish and/or Quechua or Aymara, and their customs and beliefs are a mix of the Andean way of living practiced by early Peruvians and the Catholic practices implemented by the Spaniards.

Lake Titicaca, undeniably the most popular attraction of Puno among travelers, can offer a truly amazing experience. Several communities have inhabited the area around the lake and even in the lake for hundreds of years, and their customs have barely changed. A standard visit to the lake will take travelers to the artificial Uros Islands, were locals have been constructing the islands with the Totora plant (a subspecies of the giant bulrush sedge) for at least 500 years. This one-day tour also allows travelers to visit Taquile Island, where natives welcome visitors and give demonstrations of their ancient practices and way of living. One of their main activities is weaving. Men play an important role in this task, and their clothing tells people who they are in their community.

The standard visit is the most common activity around the lake; however, there are other activities which offer a richer experience. For instance, the people of the Taquile, Amantani, and Uros Islands have prepared basic accommodations to welcome travelers who want to spend the night on the islands. In addition to learning more about the native customs, these travelers get to experience incredible sunsets and sunrises. In addition to these three islands, Suasi Island can offer a superb experience for travelers looking for more comfortable accommodations. The hotel there offers an all-inclusive three-day package for visiting the island and also relaxing in a unique location.

“La Virgen de la Candelaria,” the most interesting and entertaining Andean festival in Peru, takes place in February every year. This celebration congregates hundreds of colorfully costumed dancers and musicians, who energetically perform in the streets of Puno. Their music and dances, having evolved over time, are an artful expression of the syncretism of Quechua, Aymara, and Catholic traditions.

The traditions and customs of the locals are the product of ancient civilizations as well as the harsh environment itself, where humans, plants, and animals have had to adapt to the rugged terrain with its low temperatures and high elevation. The ancient Peruvians who settled in this area left behind the archaeological sites of Pucara and Sillustani. These sites offer important information about their customs and practices. The Pucara people developed an important civilization around 200 BC, building an impressive administrative center where several monoliths representing humans and animals, such as snakes, frogs, pumas, and fish, have been found. Later on, the Tiahuanaco emerged near La Paz in Bolivia and extended their domain to the region of Puno and other regions of southern Peru. At the archaeological site of Sillustani, travelers can observe the remains of tombs built by the Tiahuanacos, Collas, and Incas. This site is located next to Umayo Lake, where Andean flamingo inhabit during the warmer months of the year (mid-October to mid-April).

A visit to Puno should be carefully planned due to its high elevation. It is highly recommended that travelers first visit a lower-elevation region such as Arequipa or Cusco to get acclimated before spending time in Puno. When visiting the region, travelers should stay near the downtown or around the lake. Staying downtown allows travelers to experience the local way of living with several options to enjoy Peruvian food while observing local music and dance performances. Staying close to the lake allows travelers to relax at one of the secluded hotels in that area.

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By Renato Romero - Founder of My Peru Guide LLC

#puno #laketiticaca #lake titicaca #punotravel #punotours #punotour #sillustani #sillustanipuno #pucara #pucarapuno

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Brasília Cerrado-city by Carlos M Teixeira

Brasília Cerrado, cidade e natureza, paisagismo urbano, cerrado, vazios e sólidos, ecologia urbana, Moisei Ginzburg, Architecture

Brasília, Cerrado-city

19 July 2021

Location: Brasília, Brasil, South America

Brasília, Cerrado-city by Carlos M Teixeira architect

Resume

E se Brasília fosse retomada pelo Cerrado que ela destruiu? Esse artigo descreve uma capital imaginária agora integrada neste bioma. Pois Brasília não tomou posse do Planalto Central: este é que está, sub-repticiamente, recuperando um território perdido.

What if Brasília was taken over by the Cerrado that it once destroyed? This article describes an imaginary capital now integrated into this biome. Because Brasilia did not take possession of the Central Plateau: in fact, the biome is trickily recovering an apparently lost territory.

¿Qué pasa si Brasilia fue tomada por el Cerrado que la destruyó? Este artículo describe una capital imaginaria ahora integrada en este bioma. Pues Brasilia no tomó posesión del Planalto Central: él está, subrepticiamente, recuperando un territorio aparentemente perdido.

Brasilia, Cerrado-city

Sinopse

Carlos M Teixeira é arquiteto pela Escola de Arquitetura da UFMG (Belo Horizonte), mestre em urbanismo pela Architectural Association (Londres) e doutorando pela FAUP (Porto). Publicou os livros “Em obras: história do vazio em BH” (Cosac Naify, 1999) e “Ode ao Vazio” (Romano Guerra / Nhamérica, 2017), e é sócio do escritório Vazio S/A.

Carlos M Teixeira is an architect at the School of Architecture / UFMG (Belo Horizonte), a master in urbanism at the Architectural Association (London) and a PhD student at FAUP (Porto). He published the books “Under construction: history of the void in BH” (Cosac Naify, 1999) and “Ode to the void” (Romano Guerra / Nhamérica, 2017), and is a partner at Vazio S/A.

Carlos M Teixeira es arquitecto por la Escuela de Arquitectura de la UFMG (Belo Horizonte), maestro en urbanismo por la Architectural Association (Londres) y estudiante de doctorado de la FAUP (Oporto). Publicó los libros “Em obras: história do vazio em BH” (Cosac Naify, 1999) y “Ode ao vazio” (Romano Guerra / Nhamérica, 2017), y es socio de Vazio S/A.

Brasília, cidade-Cerrado

Author: Carlos M Teixeira

Brasília, Cerrado-city

The natural landscape around Brasília is the Cerrado, the tropical savanna that covers much of the country’s midlands and harbors some typological similarities with the scruffy vacant lots, brakes and thickets of large cities. The Cerrado is the wild grasses of Brasília and its environs, mixed with creeping weeds, sedges and rushes that invade the sidewalks and plague kept lawns (in this strict sense, Cerrado = urban grass). And just like weeds are detested in the urban environment, the Cerrado is considered the runt of Brazil’s biomes, and is the one extended the fewest legal protections.

Range | The second-largest landscape formation in Brazil, the Cerrado is one of its seven biomes, covering an area of approximately 1.5 million km2 (22% of the national territory). Though concentrated on the Central Tableland, especially the states of Minas Gerais, Goiás, Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul and Tocantins, the Cerrado stretches north to Amapá and as far south as Paraná. The biome is home to a third of Brazil’s biodiversity, 5% of the world’s flora and fauna, and the headwaters that supply the country’s three major catchment basins (Araguaia/Tocantins, São Francisco and Paraná/Paraguai). It’s flora is unique, with well-dispersed trees and shrubs coexisting with dense grass and brush cover, producing a South-American version of the African savannah. As it transitions into all of Brazil’s other ecosystems, geopolitical regions and territories, the Cerrado is an agent of national integration. The balance of this ecosystem, surpassed only by the Amazon in terms of biodiversity, is of fundamental importance to the stability of all other Brazilian biomes.

Why Cerrado? | The appearance of the Cerrado’s characteristic plant formations is explained:[1]

By pedological theories: according to which the vegetation is seen as dependent on edaphic and geological aspects, such as mineral deficiencies, soil saturation by elements like aluminum, differences in drainage and soil depth;

By climate theories: according to which Cerrado vegetation is the result of climate, especially the seasonal water shortages during the dry period; and

By biotic theories: for which Cerrado vegetation is a response to human action, chiefly our frequent use of fire, and the impact of other elements in the biota, such as ants.

Flora | The Cerrado can display different sorts of vegetation depending on the amount of water available, the regime and degree of fire-use, and the prevailing soil type. As such, the biome can present itself under numerous guises: park savanna, wooded savanna, Cerrado proper, “Cerradão”, or wild grasslands, and even gallery forest. Park savanna is dominated by gramineous plants, while the woodier variants escalate into shrubs and bushes. Cerrado proper is sparsely wooded grassland, while Cerradão denotes thick brush. Gallery forest is found along the banks of streams and usually consists of evergreen species, some of which can be quite tall.

The Cerrada is home to a rich flora. The order that predominates on the woody stratum is the Fabaceae (Leguminosae), while the herbaceous stratum is dominated by the Poaceae (Gramineae) and Composites. There are thought to be 10 thousand different species in the Cerrado, many of which are used to produce cork, fibers and oils, as a material in arts and crafts, and in several foods and medicines. The trees have taproots that can burrow as deep as 12 meters underground to reach the water table—affording a constant water supply even during drought. Another characteristic is deciduousness, or leaf-loss, a strategy that enables plants to economize on water being lost through leaf transpiration during dry periods. The most robust specimens tend to be medium sized (3 to 6 meters tall), with gnarled and twisted trunk and branches, pre-historically thick bark and coriaceous leaves.

The twisted aspect of Cerrado tree branches is explained by the “burning of the apical meristem”. All Cerrado plants have an apical meristem (growth zone) and secondary meristems that remain inactive unless the apical meristem is shorn or irremediably damaged. When the apical meristem is burned, as often occurs in the region, secondary meristems are activated and growth resumes in another direction. The fire explanation is further strengthened by the fact that some seeds only germinate after being burned—a sort of vaccination against fire. Another strong indicator is the thickness of the tree bark, which functions as a species of fire-resistant cladding.[2]

Pyrolandscaping | If the Cerrado’s trees are gnarled by fire, then what we have is a flora defined by its capacity to adapt to fire and avoid destruction by it. A “pyrolandscape” formed by two different types of pyrovegetation: the passive pyrophytes, or species that adopt strategies to resist destruction by fire (twisted trees); and active pyrophytes, consisting of species that depend on fire to thrive and regenerate (the graminaceous plants).[3]

Scrubland | As a tropical savanna seen by most as a poor biome and convenient spillover for farmland, the Cerrado receives little legal protection. Unlike the Atlantic Forest, Amazon Rainforest, and Pantanal wetlands, the Cerrado is not listed as Natural Heritage in the Federal Constitution, despite being one of the 25 most biodiverse regions on the planet, and the most biodiverse savanna in existence. Only 1.7% of its total area enjoys strict-use protected area status. And, just as urban weeds and grasses are ignored, the Cerrado is seen as a wasteland ripe for new, territorial-scale undertakings. Back in the Seventies, the Midwest, most of which lies within the Cerrado, produced roughly 6% of Brazil’s soya. Today, it produces around half. Livestock farming in the Midwest has grown exponentially and currently accounts for a third of Brazil’s cattle herds and a fifth of its swine. This livestock expansion is one of the main pressures on the Cerrado today. Recent studies by Embrapa, the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation, found that under 5% of the Cerrado remains in viable fragments—swaths of over 2,000 hectares capable of sustaining the biome’s reproductive chains. If we add smaller pockets, the total amount of preserved Cerrado reaches no more than 20%.

Lúcio Costa | Inspired by the parks of England, where he spent his childhood, Lúcio Costa, author of Brasília’s Pilot Plan, considered lawns one of the most important ingredients in the capital’s urbanist concept. Essentially, Brasília is an axis of key public buildings and residential super blocks, joined by a road system capable of functioning without the need for intersections. And all of this is girded by gardens and parks designed according to “landscaping techniques”.

However, for Costa, Brasília was not a Cerrado-city, but a city consisting of an artificial/natural landscape blend: “Normally, urbanization means creating the conditions for a city to happen. But in Brasília it meant taking the place—in the manner of the Conquistadores or Louis XV—and imposing upon it an urban structure capable of receiving, over the short term, the installation of a new Capital. Unlike cities that conform and adjust to the landscape, in the desert Cerrado, spread beneath an immense open sky, as if built upon the high seas, it was the city that created the landscape.”[4]

And yet, what happened was the opposite: the landscape created the city, and that is why I can safely say that Brasília is, first and foremost, a Cerrado-city (or, to create an even more sonorous definition, a Scrubland-city). It is undoubtedly the highest praise a Cerrado-built city could receive—never mind the various differences between the exotic trees of Brasília and the untouched Cerrado of the rest of Federal District.

Cerrado-city? There is very likely a Brasília mythology that remains to be told. The blue sky and red land will someday birth a new prose, a new ecology: those of the unending grasses. No monument, no exuberances. And yet, what is it that makes the Cerrado so fascinating? It must be the power of its sheer territorial expanse. The murmuring of its endangered immensity. The end of the heroic distinction between nature and culture. The unplanned clash between Brazilian architecture and the Central Tableland. The succession of rigid functions of modern urbanism (hotel sector, commercial sector, banking sector, etc.) corrupted by the free succession of thick-barked trees (stryphnodendrons, kielmeyeras, Machaerium villosum, etc.). The organic writhing of twisted trunks muddying the geometric curves of the vaults and the arches. The modern capital as incontrovertible proof that Brazil is not a modern country, but a place where nature still reigns with crushing ease. The negation of the nation’s baroque and colonial heritage and an ode to the primary vitality of the earth, not to mention the perfect expression of our culpability: after all, why isn’t Brasília a Cerrado-city?

Revenge | The artificial predominance of bahiagrass on the Ministerial Esplanade has its days numbered. Contrary to dear Lúcio’s wishes, there are no English lawns in Brasília: molasses-grass seeds hibernate, lying in wait, biding their time to exact revenge for their expulsion. The future belongs to the local species, not the exotic blow-ins the city’s gardening corps struggles to maintain.

Brasília’s defenders will argue that there is still some autochthonous vegetation to be found in the city, but they have been deceived by appearances. For example: the buriti palms that adorn the capital’s palaces did not grow there naturally. They were uprooted and transplanted in bulk, with one particularly impressive specimen being replanted in Buritis Square. It stands 20 meters tall, weighs 25 tons and is around 200 years old (the age was estimated from the rings in the verge trunk). In 1967, 51 buriti palms were dispatched to Itamarati Palace. In 1971, 47 were sent to the Urban Military Sector. In 1977, buritis that once stood in a grove in Goiás were uprooted and packed off to Brasília’s Recreational Park.[5] (One of the reasons for transplanting trees was the slow growth rate of Cerrado plants. A canela-de-ema [Vellozia squamata], for example, reaches reproductive maturity at the ripe old age of 1,000, and a purple threeawn, at 600. It takes a buriti palm half a millennium to reach a height of 30 meters. As the geographer Altair Barbosa said, the veredas [6]—which existed in abundance until recently—were made up of young plants when Pedro Álvares Cabral “discovered” Brazil in 1500. The palm trees that were just sprouting then now stand 25 or 30 meters tall.)

But, getting back to the the revenge of the native grasses: it’s not just a local matter. Consider, for example, the negative effect of grass in the United States, a country where almost every house sits in a well-tended lawn. This tradition began with the castles of the French and British aristocracy in the late middle ages, when it was seen (and still is) as a symbol of power, prestige and wealth. Some time later, with the model of the American suburb followed by the invention of automatic irrigation systems and the lawnmower, lawns became accessible to millions of families, to such an extent that they are now a fundamental element of the suburban paradise cultivated by the petit-bourgeoisie. A NASA study recently revealed that there are 63,000 square miles of garden lawns in the US, an area larger than the state of Georgia. Keeping all those lawns nice and green can take up 50 to 75% of a residence’s annual water consumption. American lawnmowers guzzle 17 million gallons of fuel each year and belch the fumes back into the atmosphere.Then there are the fertilizers and pesticides: garden-owners spend US$ 36 billion on these agrochemicals per annum, a sum 4.5 times the annual budget of the US Environmental Protection Agency.

A lawn of native grasses, on the other hand, provides habitat for birds and insects. Gramineous spreads are a natural carbon sink, extracting carbon dioxide from the air and storing it in their roots deep underground. In dry places, like southern California, there is no reason for there to be conventional lawns: in the light of recent droughts, Californian city halls have started offering homeowners incentives to replace their lawns with native vegetation.[7]

Biological Invasions | It sounds like the title of a disaster movie, but it’s actually an academic journal published since 1999 by the Swiss group Springer International Publishing. Biological Invasions runs countless papers on alien invasive species. Biotic Homogenization of the South American Cerrado, for instance, speaks of the invasion of the Cerrado and discusses how it might be contributing toward biotic homogenization. The Cerrado is slowly being overtaken by non-native species, whether through crops or pasture, while the native species are becoming increasingly endangered through habitat loss and the alkalization of the Cerrado’s acidic soils.

Figure v Background | As many critics of the modern city have noted, in the traditional baroque city, the houses are the background and the streets themselves, the foreground. Façades are a solid constructed mass that serves as background to squares and streets, both essentially public spaces. In Ouro Preto, for example, the voids are not infinite: they are foreground, and they have form, drawn by the surrounding buildings. Tiradentes Square, the city’s main public space, is a rectangle with four clearly delineated sides: at one end stands the Minas School, with the Municipal Assembly and Jailhouse at the other, with terraces of two-story townhouses running between them on either side. It’s a convention of the traditional city that can be schematized as solid=background, void=foreground. The contiguous blocks (solids) hedge an environment (void); the everyday structures define the public spaces.

The modern city inverted this convention in a radical manner: each building was to be a highlight. Rather than compose a continuous, homogeneous background fabric, modern buildings are objectual, made for the importance of a monument. Where before, as in Ouro Preto, façades were continuous and the voids, discontinuous and hemmed, now the voids are continuous backdrop and the buildings themselves the delimited foreground figures. The buildings of today have four sides, each equally important, and are made to be viewed from multiple angles, while the anonymous buildings of Ouro Preto have only one main façade. Every modern building aspires to monumentality, as an island in a sea of greenery; each unit in the superblocks of Brasília, for example, is supposed to be seen against a neutral backdrop.[8]

But the city made of isolated objects in rambling voids, of disperse bodies that, in principle, translate a fair and enlightened, free and rational society is also the city of disorientations caused by repetition, the unbroken continuum without end or limit, the lack of references or urban landmarks that confuses even the longest-standing residents (and, obviously, it is also the city of inequality and injustice). Each block is sculptural, but this accumulation of objects generates what the anthropologist James Holsten called “sculptural anonymity” and “semantic impossibility”. Objects that say they define the space of the superblocks are actually only occupiers of space that delimit nothing at all. Perhaps that’s why the binomial is useless to Brasília, on one side, and to the Cerrado, on the other: we need to adopt a new foreground/background, nature/architecture strategy.

New Ecology | Are we standing before an opportunity to imagine a new urban ecology? A new way of seeing the city in which it and the territory blend indissociably into one-in-the-same landscape? Here, the background predominates and blurs the foreground; the air, the light, the vegetation, and the heat undo the architecture. The background to Brasília is a wild green that does not need to be tended behind fences, like the lawns of a conventional park. What we have is an unnameable middle ground: the vegetation here consists of those pesky grasses that grow unkempt in vacant urban lots, but it’s an urban extension of a natural domain that encompasses the nation’s second largest reserve of fauna and flora. A successful fusion of foreground/background that puts into practice what other modern cities pursue as their ultimate end—an end that is here attainable, because we’re smack in the middle of an inebriating asset: the Cerrado.

The greenery that lifts our spirits amidst all the dispiriting concrete blocks; the sea of space that battles back the arrogance of this urban undertaking; we have to speak of Brasília with innocence, waiting to trigger an as yet embryonic stratagem. A maneuver that calls for the coexistence of order and disorder, permanence and becoming, future and past, background/foreground and foreground/background.

However, discovering the torpor of the Cerrado should always be done with one caveat in mind: it is no longer virgin; its page is not entirely blank, but bears signs of prior use. The operation, the act of discovery, has to be contaminated, in advance, with the conflict between solids and voids, greens and magentas. Analogically, the iconoclastic work “Erased de Kooning Drawing” serves as a sort of parallel to the revelation of these voids. In 1953, the artist Robert Rauschenberg bought a drawing by fellow artist Willem de Kooning and, with the latter’s permission, erased the lines of the original drawing until only faint traces were left on the paper, thus “using the gesture to erase the gesture, the creative device employed anew to undo a set of meanings and replace it with another, devolving the aesthetic unity attained by a completed work to the primordial unity whence it came—the empty canvas or sheet of paper”.[9] Rauchenberg’s procedure erased De Kooning’s drawing, but left its indelible mark, as it were, on the paper.

The critic José Miguel Wisnik has said: “The backlands self-destruct, inviolable — because, for better or worse, something of it always remains, the irreducible and rebellious substrate of all its reboundings—, always growing back, because nothing is capable of scything it away (and its chopped trees are living proof).”[10]

The backlands are inviolable, but not everyone sees them that way. When he drew up the axes of his Pilot Plan, Lúcio Costa made a proclamation worthy of a conquistador: “The gesture of one who is staking claim: two axes crossed at right angles.” But no, Brasília staked no claim over the Central Tableland: it is what it is, where it is, cunningly, reclaiming a territory thought lost. There must lie a red and acidic soil underneath all that tarmac (sous les pavés, la terre!); there must be signs of the Cerrado’s persistence in Brasília and Brasília’s insistence in the Cerrado. Just like Brazil’s conservative modernity consists of two layers—the archaic and the new—always superposed and never peeled apart.

The other, the same : So have the backlands become the nation’s capital? Yes, if we opt for the persuasiveness of absurdity. “This constructive and destructive power, which takes over the space, blind to the biomass it clears away, is still and forever the backlands, the other and the same, its double”.[11] The same backlands of which the sociologist Gilberto Freyre said, back in 1968: “as a new city, Brasília should not be considered a pure architectural problem, nor even a problem of urbanism, but of ecology. Of tropical ecology in all its complexity.” He went further: “(…) I blame Juscelino Kubitschek, who should have invited ecologists and social scientists to provide some check and balance to the flights of fancy of his team of artists from other fields and practices.”[12]

Rio | Seen from inside the buildings of his Contemporary City, what are the gardens designed by Le Corbusier? Part of his plan to “free up the center” and spread the greenery citywide. But also an essential aspect of the modern city: endowing it with vast neutral lawns as the backdrop to an architecture that was always intended as foreground figure. A tamed and homogeneous product of landscaping. “Sun, space, verdure: essential joys. Through the four seasons stand the trees, friends of man. Great blocks of dwellings run through the town. What does that matter? They are behind the screen of trees. Nature is entered into the lease.”[13]

But now they are shaking off that neutrality in favor of a verdant virulence, encroaching on the courts and patios in an irrational shift that rebuffs the modern discourse. How can the city of Rio de Janeiro be conquered by an army of ornamental plants, as arrowheads, Swiss cheese plants, devil’s ivy and lacy trees unleash a sneaky ambush, creeping from their concrete window boxes to seize the sidewalks, clamber up the tree trunks and overrun the flower beds as a raiding plague. That’s the difference between Rio and other cities: here, the plan, like a Benign Tumor[14], is no environmentalist delirium, but just another element in a surreal reality. And even if it’s confined, for now, to the South Zone, it may be just biding its time before expanding into downtown and the North Zone too.

Moisei Ginzburg, or the conflictual clash of magenta and green | It was Moisei Ginzburg, architect and theorist of Soviet constructivism, who proposed an even more radical strategy for Moscow in his Green City project: the capital was to be gradually transformed, naturally and entropically dissolved.

According to the call for entries to an architecture competition organized by the government of the USSR in 1930, the Green City was initially to be a holiday resort with capacity for one hundred thousand vacationers at a time connected to Moscow by an existing railroad. But Ginzburg’s design was more ambitious than that, and went much further, transforming Moscow itself into one big park. To work this transformation, he proposed three strategic measures: relocate institutional buildings, relocate the Moscovite population to areas adjacent to highways out of the capital, and, most radical of all, ban all new constructions inside Moscow.

The idea was to let the buildings be overgrown by the grasses of the Russian steppe, allow the city to be transformed by entropy, erasing all trace of the counterrevolutionary presence. (Moscow would be an urban manifesto of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, after the description by the author Isaac Asimov: “We have to work hard to straighten a room, but left to itself, it becomes a mess again very quickly and very easily. Even if we never enter it, it becomes dusty and musty. How difficult to maintain houses, and machinery, and our own bodies in perfect working order; how easy to let them deteriorate. In fact, all we have to do is nothing, and everything deteriorates, collapses, breaks down, wears out, all by itself—and that is what the Second Law is all about.”[15]

But, getting back to Ginzburg, he proposed disurbanizing the traditional city, letting the capitalist city fall to rot while suburbanizing the entire Soviet Union. The buildings symbolic of Czarism would not be artificially preserved: from the very moment they were considered dispensable, all heritage protection would be lifted. There would be no heritage institute at all, and the state would be unburdened of the obligation to simulate life in dead buildings. These would be left to crumble and be swallowed up by returning nature. With time, Moscow would become a rambling park of overgrown lots, of palaces and old buildings in leafy ruin, with no pipes or pumps or prosthesis to keep them in shape. In other words, Moscow would become a mosaic of tones of green and magenta, where flurries of warm hues would meet islands of repose in verdant tracts. But this greenery would never be dull, thanks to violent eruptions—healthily disturbing infiltrations, if you will— of magenta. In the end, this vision of the “city turned inside out” would generate, not monotonous green, nor edgy magenta, but a blend of both: magenta + green = grey.

Ginsburg was under the influence of disurbanism, a doctrine that preached the end of the concept of the city as we know it. In 1930, the USSR was still a hotbed of extreme experiments, with various groups of artists and architects organizing themselves under competing revolutionary manifestos. The sociologist Mikhail Okhitovich was one of the intellectuals who proposed taking the socialist experiment down dangerously unprecedented roads. His disurbanism envisioned settlements scattered throughout the Soviet Union, with collective mess halls, recreational centers, and employment bureaus just off branches of highway, all vaguely reminiscent of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City. Through a nationwide transport, energy and communications network, disurbanism would spread 42m2 single-family residences all across the country. The state would provide each individual with a light, pre-fabricated unit that could be coupled with other units as the person saw fit, and all interconnected by a mesh of roadways, railways and airports. Urban agglomerations in the form of cities would be eliminated in favor of low-density, self-sufficient settlements with 20, 50 or as few as 3 residents! And Moscow, relieved of its remit as a city, would be converted into a colossal park.[16]

A defender of the opposition of the exiled Leon Trotsky, Mikhail Okhitovich fell out with the Communist Party at the start of Stalin’s rise, and, having attacked the personality cult growing up around him, found himself rebuked by the Politburo for his intellectual and architectural output. His disurbanism was branded economically incapacitating, and he was arrested, sent to the Gulag and finally executed in 1937.[17]

Le Corbusier had once said that the modern city should be one big park, but his Contemporary City was not radical enough. He never cogitated a city-park the size of the world’s largest country or a Paris entirely left to the destructive forces of nature. And, for that, Ginsburg attacked his former idol, now scorned as a conformist and reactionary. Interested in designing projects in the USSR, the rising hope of a new society and new world, Corbusier responded to the threat posed by the disurbanists in a letter addressed to Ginzburg. The Russian replied as follows:

“My dear Le Corbusier,

(…) You, the best of surgeons of the contemporary city, you want to cure it by all means. This is why you elevate the city on poles wishing to solve the unsolvable problem of movement in a metropolis, a movement in the absence of space. You create magnificent gardens on the roofs of multi-story buildings wishing to give people an extra bit of greenery, you create charming villas, giving their inhabitants ideal conveniences, peace and comfort. But you create all that because you wish to cure the city, [you] attempt to essentially preserve it the way it was created by capitalism.

It happens that we, in the USSR, are in a more favorable position—we are not tied to the past. History confronts us with problems that require revolutionary solutions and, however insufficient our resources may be, we will solve them, come what may.

We diagnose the contemporary city. We say: yes, it is ill, mortally ill. But we do not want to cure it. We prefer to destroy it and want to start working on the creation of a new type of human settlement, which would be devoid of internal contradictions and which we could call socialist.”[18]

Identity | But we are not living in times anywhere as futurist as those that begot the modern city or even the Green City. On the contrary: ours is a time in which we are best advised to envision a future based on what we’ve already got and which considers the latent potential of the existing city, whatever that may be.

Since it was declared a UNESCO heritage site in 1987, everything in Brasília has conspired towards maintenance ipsis literis; towards a hands-tied rigidity and bureaucratization. Fossilized by nostalgia, its future is no longer contained in the Pilot Plan, but in the satellite towns founded by the demobbed construction workers who built it. So any chance of reinventing the Pilot Plan lies in its empty spaces: only there—in its greenery, not its concrete—can we imagine a potential landscape as a source of surprises and new identities. Or: the magenta as a sea of sameness formed by six-floor blocks; the green as freedom and future. Today, turning Brasília into a more diverse city means investing in what’s left to us to touch, the remaining pockets of potential for identification and differentiation: on one hand, landscape as expression in the superblocks; on the other, as a better future for the satellite cities. Out of the omnipresent Cerrado surges a new metropolitan region with more variations and fewer inequalities.

This proposal is not entirely contrary to Lúcio Costa’s ideas on urban landscape. In fact, it confirms some of them: the superblocks, for Costa, were to be “framed by a large, thick belt of trees, large trees, with different species dominating in each block, rising out of lawns behind an intermittent curtain of shrubbery and foliage, literally hedging the blocks from view at any angle, shunting them into a background buffered by landscape. There is a dual advantage to this, insofar as it guarantees a certain urbanist uniformity regardless of the density, category, standard or architectural quality of its buildings (…)”[19].

Heritage Protection In the end, what UNESCO listing did was freeze a city that is more scrubland than town and which has such vast voids that they might even be more interesting with a few more constructions in them. Ironically, urban ecologists, potential allies of a Green Pilot Plan, disapprove of it. Being declared a heritage protection site perpetuated Brasília as an economically inviable, socially unjust and ecologically unsustainable city: its mono-functional zones and the large distances between every this and that are the image of a city that is inhospitable to the pedestrian, to street life, to mixed uses, to the act of walking and to any viable public transport (not to mention the gaping inequalities between the Pilot Plan and the satellite towns). For the urban ecologists, the efficient cities are those that are dense and compact and manage to maximize public and private investments through their capacity to generate their own resources, essential to maintaining their ongoing and sustainable development. Brasília, the federal capital and symbol of the nation, is thus a benchmark of Brazilian inefficiency—a characteristic that has a positive side to it, all the same. So Brasília is an anti-modern city: if modernity means function, rationality and therapeutic quality. Brasília is all pomp, excess and waste; all caused by modern zoning and those intermittent sprawls of void.

But the city is not alone in this double-edged fiasco. It is trust in technique—in a technique of poetic dimensions—, created as if out of momentary spasms and convulsions that then relax back into their primitive state. As the art critic Ronaldo Brito said in Contra o Culto da Ignorância, “We desire a ‘natural order’—let thought return to it as fast as it possibly can—(…) To the problems of thought, [we, Brazilians] apply nature. To those of nature, we apply thought. All our trust in technique seems to rest, secretly, on our belief in nature—after all, she is Amazonian, prodigious and inexhaustible. Our symbolism responds to technique in a very simple way—it tries to mythologize it, turn it, one way or another, into magic.”

All we can do now is believe in this other capital, transforming it into a Cerrado-city before farming and livestock ranching can advance upon it and transform it in their image once and for all. As almost all of the Cerrado has been converted into soya plantations and pasture, the time has come for an absurd natural vengeance to strike environmentally and politically where it is least expected: in Brasília.

[1] “Guia do Cerrado”, Empresa das Artes: São Paulo, 2003

[2] “Ecossistemas: Cerrado”, in ONG VivaTerra, www.vivaterra.org.br, accessed on 03/2006

[3] According to a classification used by the landscaper Gilles Clément in “Paysages du feu”, https://www.botanique-jardins-paysages.com/102011-2/, accessed on 04/2019

[4] Lúcio Costa, “Registro de uma Vivência”, Rio de Janeiro, 1995

[5] Marta Adriana Bustos Romero, “A sustentabilidade do ambiente urbano da capital”. In: Brasília, controvérsias ambientais. Brasília: Editora Universidade de Brasília, 2003

[6] Veredas are “oases” of palm trees that grow among shrubs near headwaters or watercourses in the Cerrado.

[7] Eric Holthaus, “Get Rid of Your Lawn”, in Slate Magazine 06/05/2019, https://slate.com/technology/2019/05/lawns-are-bad-get-rid-of-them.html, acessado em 05/2019

[8] James Holston, “A Cidade Modernista”, Companhia das Letras: São Paulo, 1993, 126

[9] Paul Wood, “Arte Conceitual”, Cosac & Naify: São Paulo, 2002

[10] José Miguel Wisnik, “O famigerado”, Scripta, vol. 5/nº10: Belo Horizonte, 2002

[11] José Miguel Wisnik, “O famigerado”, Scripta, vol. 5/nº10: Belo Horizonte, 2002

[12] Gilberto Freyre, “Brasis, Brasil e Brasília”. Rio de Janeiro: Record, 1968

[13] Le Corbusier, “The Home of Man”, London, 1948. Cited in Collin Rowe, Fred Koetter, Collage city, MIT Press: Cambridge, 1984, p 51

[14] “If the history of Belo Horizonte is a film, it can be summarized as a transformation of a young town’s voids into the full spaces of a saturated city. This project is a scene from this film watched in fast-rewind, as on a VCR: it’s a regression through history that, paradoxically, reveals the city’s best futures.

We recapitulate the entire history of BH in a matter of minutes, just to make the absurd occupation of its voids all the clearer. If this city’s “progress” is identified with the gradual occupation of its lots, parks and greenery, the retrocession consists in emptying out the fullness and reinstating the emptiness and removed nature. Uncluttering the center, efficiently filling out and interconnecting the outskirts, imagining projects every bit as a delirious as was the densification of Belo Horizonte in the first place. Returning, that is, to the origins of the city, imagining once more the liberty and power of its voids. We watch the urban zone as it becomes a huge Municipal Park, in an act of ‘urbanist vengeance’.

Like an enormous Central Park—at once the negation and exaltation of the city—, the urban zone will be handed over to the nature that belongs to it: the nature of things that eschew the artificiality of architecture. The revenge: the inverse metastasizing of that which characterized the city’s growth. A benign tumor. A stain of voids contaminated by fullnesses. A regression: a return to the beginning of history as a way of envisioning a healthier future.” In Carlos M Teixeira, “História do vazio em Belo Horizonte. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 1999.

[15] Isaac Asimov, “In the Game of Energy and Thermodynamics You Can’t Even Break Even”, Smithsonian Institution Journal (June 1970), p.6

[16] Fosco Lucarelli, “Mikhail Okhitovich and Disurbanism”, in http://socks-studio.com/2012/07/14/mikhail-okhitovich-and-the-disurbanism/, accessed on 02/2019

[17] Idem.

[18] Alla Vronskaya, “The utopia of personality: Moisei Ginsburg project for the Moscow’s park of culture and leisure”, in Problema voluminis 4.

[19] Lúcio Costa, “Plano Piloto de Brasília”, Módulo Arquitetura Ltda, s/data. Another reference on the importance of integration with the landscape in Costa’s work is the description of his preliminary design for the Monlevade Workers’ Villa (1934), which was structured along three main principles, the third of which was, “in the interests of the program itself, to cause as little damage as possible to the natural beauty of the place.”

Brasília Cerrado-city by Carlos M Teixeira images / information received 190721

Architect Carlos Teixeira works for Vazio Arquitetura in Brasil

Location: Brasília, DF, Brazil

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weseekclarity · 3 years

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Getting your $TAN on.

With a record breaking heatwave upon us and energy prices soaring many homeowners are trying to find ways to become self-sustainable and more energy independent.

Solar and wind energy have been around for some time however until recently the technology has come down in price enough for the average homeowner to afford. That in combination with State and Federal incentives there has never been a better time for the industry.

But let’s say you don’t own a home yet however you want to participate in the upside of the industry. Well, get ready to get your $TAN on!

Invesco Solar ETF $TAN tracks the MAC Global Solar Energy Index, which is comprised of companies focused on the solar energy industry. The ETF normally invests at least 90% of its total assets in securities tracked by the index. It is comprised of 55 holdings as of May 11, 2021, and is heavily weighted to the information technology sector.

While globally diversified, the fund is dominated by companies domiciled in the U.S. and China. $TAN follows a blended strategy, investing in both value and growth stocks with various market capitalizations. Its top three holdings include Enphase Energy Inc. ($ENPH), a developer and manufacturer of microinverter systems for the solar photovoltaic industry; SolarEdge Technologies Inc. ($SEDG), an Israel-based provider of solar power optimization and photovoltaic monitoring solutions; and First Solar Inc. ($FSLR), a manufacturer of solar panels and provider of related services.

Best of all $TAN has a 1-year return up, 124% with a low expense ratio, and an annual dividend.

The Funny Fact: During the late '70s President Jimmy Carter's administration installed 32 solar panels on the roof of the West Wing shortly after, President Ronald Reagan removed them in 1986 because of a roof leak and decided not to reinstall them.

Editor.

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ericvick · 3 years

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Stock Market News: Jim Cramer Shares Why Stocks May Fall

Stocks are falling Thursday after news that Biden will seek a higher capital gains tax on the wealthy. The Dow is down over 250 points and the Nasdaq is down over 100 points amid trading.

Jim Cramer has a message to investors who became retail investors in the past year: The time of stocks just going up has ended. We’re back to the market that baffles and you can blame the bond market.

Cramer shared in his Real Money column from Wednesday how investors should be playing the market with the reminder that for the time being, stocks won’t keep going up. Many stocks are near all-time highs and it might make sense to start trimming.

Here is a recap of TheStreet’s coverage for Thursday, Apr. 22:

5 Things You Must Know Thursday

Stock Futures Fall as Wall Street Eyes Earnings and Virus Resurgence

Credit Suisse Posts Loss From Archegos Meltdown

Thursday’s Earnings Calendar: AT&T, Intel and Snap

Digital Sales Surge Boosts Chipotle Profit

Ford to Extend Downtime at U.S. Plants Amid Chip Shortage

Premarket Movers Thursday

Teradata (TDC) – Get Report | Increasing +29.26%

AT&T (T) – Get Report | Increasing +3.75%

Ford Motor (F) – Get Report | Increasing +2.39%

American Airlines (AAL) – Get Report | Increasing +2.62%

Southwest Airlines (LUV) – Get Report | Increasing +2.39%

AT&T added nearly 600,000 wireless subscribers, along with 2.7 million new additions to its HBO Max streaming service, helping boost its bottom line past Wall Street forecasts.

Market Movers Amid Trading Thursday

Lam Research (LRCX) – Get Report | Decreasing -3.64%

Equifax (EFX) – Get Report | Increasing +15.95%

Danaher (DHR) – Get Report | Increasing +3.62%

SolarEdge Technologies (SEDG) – Get Report | Increasing +8.20%

Coinbase Global (COIN) – Get Report | Decreasing -4.99%

Cramer shared why he is watching Lam Research on Thursday and why its performance is important to the overall market.

Here is a recap of the latest stock market action including the top stock gainers, buy-the-dip candidates, volume leaders and advice from Jim Cramer from Wednesday, Apr. 21.

Top Stock Gainers on Wednesday

Wellbilt (WBT) – Get Report | +44.47% Increase

Skillz (SKLZ) – Get Report | +33.55% Increase

Fisker (FSR) – Get Report | +17.17% Increase

Luminar Technologies (LAZR) – Get Report | +15.22% Increase

OpenDoor Technologies (OPEN) | +11.37% Increase

TheStreet looked at the top electric vehicle companies on Thursday including which companies could be competitors to Tesla. Cramer said if everything goes right Fisker could be the next Tesla.

Buy-the-Dip Candidates

Netflix (NFLX) – Get Report | -7.40% Decrease

Peloton Interactive (PTON) – Get Report | -8.53% Decrease

Halliburton (HAL) – Get Report | -6.59% Decrease

Spotify Technology (SPOT) – Get Report | -5.48% Decrease

Oracle (ORCL) – Get Report | -5.45% Decrease

While many investors were quick to sell the reported weaker-than-expected results by Netflix that included a slowdown in subscriber growth, Cramer said he’s taking the other side of the trade, and giving Netflix the benefit of the doubt.

Wednesday Volume Leaders

Skillz (SKLZ) – Get Report | 6,105,62 Shares Traded

AT&T (T) – Get Report | 3,021,478 Shares Traded

American Airlines (AAL) – Get Report | 2,123,662 Shares Traded

Fisker (FSR) – Get Report | 1,780,241 Shares Traded

Ford Motor Company (F) – Get Report | 1,275,225 Shares Traded

ARK Investment active ETFs added over 5 million shares of Skillz on Wednesday.

Best of Jim Cramer for Thursday

Morning Bell: Cramer discussed Apple’s “Spring Loaded” event, semiconductor equipment maker ASML Holding and back-to-back selloffs in the market.

Stock Market Today: Cramer shared how to trade Netflix after earnings, the CFO’s departure at Boeing and markets on Wednesday.

Mad Money Recap: Cramer told Mad Money viewers why the FAANG stocks get the benefit of the doubt, and why they deserve it.

Lightning Round: Cramer told viewers why he is bullish on Snap (SNAP) – Get Report, Boston Scientific (BSX) – Get Report and Cleveland-Cliffs (CLF) – Get Report.

Jim Cramer Live: Cramer and Katherine Ross talked about Netflix, Boeing (BA) – Get Report, ASML Holding (ASML) – Get Report, and market rotations.

Ford, Boeing, and Apple are key holdings in Jim Cramer’s Action Alerts PLUS member club. Want to be alerted before Jim Cramer buys or sells the stock? Learn more now.

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#Cramer #fall #Jim #market #News #shares #Stock #Stocks

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transparentmanposts · 3 years

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Death of the Greatest Society

Dear Friends,A lot has happened this 2020 Presidential election which I find, and I am sure more then half the country finds unsettling.Here is a list of disturbing events that have taken place that are Bladen attack on the constitution and the bill of rights.The press/media: No long reports the news with a none byes ‘political view. They have become the mouth piece for the socialist left.Government Agencies: National intelligent agency both foreign and domestic have been used to spy on the president and his cabinet, and have purchased from foreign governments false intelligence, to concoct false narrative that trump and his cabinet were colluding with the Russians to run our country’s affairs so they will benefit The Russians’ causes.Congress: Failing to up hold A free, a fair, uncorrupted election system that is protected from foreign and domestic interference.Making speeches that encourage their follower to silence, to force their opponent out of society.Failing to uphold law and justice throughout the ranks of government. Many government officials have made a career of abusing their office’s power and influence for their own financial gain.Member of congress have violated their auth to uphold and defend the U.S. Constitution against foreign and domestic enemies.Some members have publicly made statements and worn clothes with slogan on them that are anti American and anti-Israel.Trying to impeach a president 2 times, and a third one on its way. All impeachments were bast on false accusation. These impeachments have been a waste of millions of dollars which our country went furth indebt to ChaniaGovernors, Mayors, Senators, Congressman: Guilty of using the Covet 19 pandemic, seize total control of power to intrude into the privet lives of it’s citizens. Through the shut down of privet owned businesses, to shutting down the education system, to closing churches, to placing their citizen on house lockdown.While politicians trail around the world, attending parties, go to hair solon appointments, and attend family gatherings.These politicians have failed to provide security and law and order, by allowing leftist anarchists to burn their cities, and lute the property of privet Busses owners, to assault, rape and murder its citizen.By telling their police force to stand down. By not activating their National Guard to restore order.By lie in to the country and calling these sedges peaceful demonstration, calling them the Sumer of Love.Rigging the judicial to let the anarchists that are arrested to be put back out on the street with out any trial or spending time in jail.I Think most disturbing event is that members of Congress are accusing President Trump as an insurrectionist, who incited mod violence against the capital build.I believe President Trump just encouraged his supporter to protest in front of the Capitol so that congress could how many people believe that the election was stolen, and that He won by a land slide.The president did not encourage any one to break into the capital and attack congress of vandalize the building.The President should not be punished for the actions of a few followers who decided to be anarchists take it upon their self and force their way into the capital building and vandalize it.Our government need to get back to reading and understanding the U.S. constitution, and the bill of Rights, to uphold govern our society by their statues.People who serve in government must remember they are a servant of the people, the people are not their servants.Policies need to be made to strength the welfare of our nation, not to strengthen the power of their political party.Our society need to quit the console culture. We need to return respecting our fell man, and threat our fellow citizen, as we want to be treated.WE alt to practice Luke 10:27And he answered, “YOU SHALL LOVE THE LORD YOUR GOD WITH ALL YOUR HEART, AND WITH ALL YOUR SOUL, AND WITH ALL YOUR STRENGTH, AND WITH ALL YOUR MIND; AND YOUR NEIGHBOR AS YOURSELF.”Written By Stephen Vattimo 1/9/2021

#politics #socialism #anarchy reigns #constitución #riots #hipocrits #cansal #cult #curent events #news updates #stephen j. vattimo

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starsuncounted · 6 years

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On Giants’ Shoulders Part 2

Gareth urged Halan over the broad, rolling plains that swept out from the city and sloped upwards to meet the hills surrounding it, pressing northwards in the direction of the capital city. He checked his horse’s pace when they began to reach the hills, which were pitted with rocks and uneven ground, and focused on finding a relatively clear path. Cresting the hill, he scanned his surroundings. One could never be too cautious in these lands, deserted though they were purported to be. He spied nothing out of sorts until a subtle movement on the eastern hills caught the corner of his eye. Peering harder at the distant hills, he narrowed his eyes to block the ascending sun’s rays. Nearly blocked by the blinding brightness of the sunlight, there stood a rider upon the highest ridge, silhouetted against the light.

Fear gripped Gareth again. These lands were supposed to be empty and forsaken. The only men who would willingly dare to walk here were certainly not friends of the kingdom. Even the neutral hill-men of the wild did not dare to venture this far east, for fear of what they might meet. No, the only people who would roam these lands were the very people the kingdom was struggling vainly to repel from its borders.

The distant rider began to race along the hilltops, heading towards Gareth. He had been seen.

He wheeled his horse towards the North again and kicked his mount into a breakneck gallop, throwing caution to the wind. He would just have to pray that Halan didn’t stumble over the rocks and fall or lame himself with a wrong step. Though Gareth had the advantage, he did not want the gap between them to close in any further. He didn’t know what the other rider was armed with. Leaning back to stabilize his horse and checking its pace, he guided it down the backside of the hill, narrowly avoiding a cleft into the hillside. Pebbles and small rocks thrown from Halan’s hooves skittered into the ravine, and his horse began to slip on the sliding rocks that covered the lower stretches of the hills. Gareth tugged on the reins slightly, not wanting to lose much more speed, but also not wanting to find himself without a mount.

Suddenly, above him he heard the tumbling of rocks scattering down a slope. The rider had already reached him, although he would, Gareth hoped fervently, be slowed by the treacherous terrain as Gareth had been. He didn’t look behind him, for fear of seeing the other rider aiming an arrow at him. Reaching the bottom of the slope, Gareth slammed his heels against his horse’s sides and bent close over its neck, and immediately Halan surged forward. Perhaps they would make it. Now Gareth dared to risk looking behind at the pursuing rider. Craning his head over his shoulder, he glanced at the rider. He was still making his way down the slope, his horse slipping as Gareth’s had, but still maintaining a fast pace. The rider was wrapped in a dark, voluminous cloak, his hood pulled over his face. He was indeed armed – a crossbow was strapped across his back and Gareth could spy the tip of a scabbard that hung at his side; and who knew how many other smaller weapons were hidden within the folds of his billowing cloak.

Gareth looked forward again, eyes darting over the approaching ground. The firm, rocky ground that had spread out from the hillsides had begun to give way to a soft, marshy grass. Tall reeds dotted the landscape, and stocky sedges sporadically sprinkled themselves in between the patches of grass. He had reached the fen that marked the southern border of the kingdom. In days past, the kingdom had sprawled far past this fen, but the frequent attacks from the south had gnawed away at the kingdom’s border, leaving only the marshlands as a safeguard against large-scale assaults. They were hardly much of a deterrent to war bands from the desolate southern expanses, and the marshlands did nothing to stop the guerilla attacks brought on by the never-ending war.

Halan surged into the morass, slowing immediately as his hooves struck the boggy ground with a muffled splash and squelch. Pressing forwards, he dug his hooves out of the grasping mire. Gareth urged him faster, hoping against hope that more speed would make their going easier. He recalled that somewhere in the fen there was a relatively solid path, but there was no time to attempt to find it now. His only hope was to cut directly through the fen and find cover in the forest that sprawled over its northern reaches. Gareth maneuvered Halan towards the pools that lay hidden among the grasses and reeds in an attempt to avoid the quagmire-like depressions that lay hidden under the carpet of low-growing grasses and dense mosses. The pools gradually amassed into a shallow lake that lay in the middle of the fen, and Gareth guided Halan in that direction. The lake would be easier to ride through, since the bottom of it was relatively solid. Perhaps they could pick up some speed there.

Halan strained over the soggy grasses and weeds and splashed through little pools of muddy water, throwing up splatters of droplets. Ahead, Gareth could see that the grassy, mossy ground began to recede and make way for a watery expanse sprinkled with graceful reeds arching out of the water. A low mist rolled over the ground, hovering over the water and shrouding the entire area in a veil. Gareth dared a glance over his shoulder before he was enveloped in the mist: nothing. The air was still and silent. Nothing could be heard except the light jingling of Halan’s harness and muffled splatter of his hooves striking water. But Gareth knew it was foolish thinking to believe he had lost the rider. These marshlands were known to play tricks on a man’s senses.

Gareth kept his ears pricked and eyed his surroundings warily. In the distance, a marsh bird cried, high and keening, and its voice floated through the deep silence. Momentarily, another bird cried in answer. Something whistled through the air, dangerously close.

Those were no birds. This was an ambush.

Something whistled past his left ear, and he felt the whisper of displaced air brush his face. How could anyone see in this maddening mist? He bent low over his horse’s neck, and kicked Halan into a breakneck gallop. They flew through the waters of the shallow lake, fleeing in an unknown direction. Heart pounding, Gareth swore under his breath and prayed they weren’t running blindly into an awaiting trap.

Suddenly, the damp mist vanished and Gareth found himself in the cool darkness of trees. They had reached the tree line marking the beginning of the forested part of the swamp. Now he only had to pass through this forest to reach the deserted flatlands that had once housed the outermost villages surrounding the walled city. From there, he would have to climb the hills that the city was tucked away in. It was too much ground to cover in one day, but if he was being pursued this fervently, it was his only choice.

In the shadowy mirk of the trees, the air was still. Gareth heard nothing but the soft thuds of Halan’s hooves in the long grass. Halan would need to be rested soon, having already travelled a great distance before their flight from the city, but Gareth didn’t know if he had lost his pursuers. Rubbing the knot of the reins between his fingers, he decided to risk it. He wouldn’t be any better off with a tired horse who couldn’t get him out of harm’s way fast enough. Checking Halan’s pace, Gareth steered him toward where the trees grew denser, twisting among each other with their great, primordial branches held aloft, seemingly clasping hands in a dance known only to them. The trees were too thick and their branches too low-hanging to ride through, so Gareth dismounted and led Halan into their cover. Perhaps he wouldn’t be found in here. Still, he withdrew his sword from the scabbard hanging at his side. What if his pursuers were familiar with this forest? He could have put himself in even more danger if they knew its paths better than he did.

#writers on tumblr #original writing #creative writing #fantasy #writing

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mariaclaragomez276 · 4 years

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The Wilderness Edition: 10 remote destinations to get away from it all

Escaping everything and everyone might be high on your post-lockdown list after spending many months indoors this year. Breaths of fresh air have been limited, and the freedom of travel restricted. If it’s all beginning to feel too close to home, here are ten far-flung corners of the world to go off-grid and off-the-beaten-track once this is all over – social distancing guaranteed.

Iceland

A dramatic landscape of black volcanic beaches, ethereal blue lagoons, lunar-like glaciers, spellbinding waterfalls, bubbling springs and lava fields, Iceland is an other-worldly escape for back-to-nature seeking travellers. While the natural beauty of this Nordic island can be experienced all year round, it feels that bit more magical during the winter – when the fjords are frozen, the rustic cabins dusted with snow, and the Northern Lights come out to play.

Hotel Rangá, Hella…This hunting lodge meets palatial log cabin is perfectly positioned for the Golden Circle and glacier expeditions. From snowmobiling to jeep safaris, dog-sledding to horse riding, caving to fishing, a world of Icelandic adventures awaits.

Scotland

From heater-dotted coastlines, hilltop castles and stone-clad villages to craggy peaks and mystical lochs, Scotland is home to some of the most ruggedly beautiful scenery in the world. There is no place quite like the Highlands for completely disconnecting from daily life, where red deer roam the valleys of Glencoe and dolphins swim in the Moray Firth – all with the spectacular backdrop of the UK‘s highest peak, Ben Nevis.

Inverlochy Castle, Fort William…From the dove-grey stone walls and romantic turrets, through to the sumptuously furnished rooms, this Scottish masterpiece of 19th-century baronial splendour is located in a postcard-worthy setting three miles from Fort William. Make the most of the Nevis Range during winter with the snow sports at nearby Aonach Mor.

Mongolia

There’s going off-the-beaten-track, and then there’s Mongolia. Sweeping grassy steppes are home to herds of native horses, which outnumber the country’s human population of largely nomadic caravans. With the Gobi Desert to the south, and the Altai Mountains to the north-west, Ulaanbaatar sits between some of the world’s most extreme terrains – and ranks as one of the coldest capital cities.

Terelj Hotel, Ulaanbaatar…Set on the banks of Terelj River in a remote spot surrounded by wild, tree-covered mountains in the Gorkhi-Terelj National Park, this elegant outpost is huddled amongst some of the most carefully protected parkland in the country. The great outdoors is right on your doorstep, from bird watching to horseback riding through meadows of edelweiss.

Sweden

Nestled in the middle of Swedish Lapland, Harads takes you to the Arctic heart of the wilderness. Here, trees heavy with snow are silhouetted against the Northern Lights and traditional red lodges line the Lule River. Home to snow-topped mountains, seemingly endless forests and fast flowing rivers, National Parks cover much of Swedish Lapland. Canoe through birch lined rivers to spot beavers, moose and even wild reindeer in their natural habitats.

Arctic Bath, Harads…Glass walls, floating walkways and sky-gazing decks connect the inside with the great outdoors at this one-of-a-kind resort, where cosy cabins seem to hover above both land and water. Wildlife enthusiasts can join a Sámi reindeer herder at an Arctic circle camp, canoe alongside beavers, embark on a moose safari, photograph golden eagles or go bear spotting.

New Zealand

With panoramic scenery stretching as far as the eye can see, it’s no wonder New Zealand has become the dream destination of many a film director. You’ll find the south island a little cooler than the north, and it tends to have more defined seasons, all equally picture-perfect. There is no shortage of ways to explore the unspoiled landscape of snow-capped mountains, fern covered forests and rolling valleys – from whale watching, bungee jumping, and helicopter rides over glaciers, to skiing and snowboarding some of the world’s best powder snow in the winter.

Bay of Many Coves, Queen Charlotte Sound…Set in a tranquil cove with beautiful views of the Marlborough Sounds, this exclusive retreat is surrounded by an eco-marine haven, way off the beaten track. You will soon understand why Captain Cook chose this area as his favoured anchorage while visiting New Zealand.

Canada

Boasting the world’s longest coastline, with the Atlantic to the East, the Pacific to the West, and the Arctic Ocean stretching along the North, Canada‘s geography is as varied as its spectacular seasons. Everything about this vast country is big: the Niagara Falls, the surf swells, the famous moose and infamous grizzly bears. Get lost in the wilderness of backcountry skiing in British Columbia, polar bear spotting on the northern tundra, whale watching on the picturesque waterfront of Vancouver Island, and canoeing along auburn tree-lined waterways in Nova Scotia.

Trout Point Lodge, Nova Scotia…A secluded nature sanctuary on the banks of the Tusket River and next to the Tobeatic Wilderness Area, this luxury lodge is surrounded by swathes of forestland. Giving guests the perfect base to discover the backwoods, you are guaranteed to get up close with the local wildlife.

Bhutan

If you’re after luxury in one of its most remote, authentic settings, the last remaining Himalayan Kingdom won’t disappoint. A year-round destination for experiencing nature in its purest form, Bhutan is one of those special places which has to be seen to be believed – hilltop fortresses with fluttering prayer flags, ancient Buddhist monasteries, rhododendrons springing into full bloom, and sedges of endangered Black-Necked Cranes circling the Phobjikha Valley each winter.

Gangtey Lodge, Phobjikha Valley…A world away from the everyday, this all-suite Himalayan hideaway immerses guests in traditional Bhutanese culture, offering an array of authentic experiences including Buddhist meditation classes, archery, and hot stone baths back at the farmhouse.

Bhutan Spirit Sanctuary, Paro…Inspired by traditional dzong architecture, this high-altitude retreat is perched amongst the clouds in Neyphu Valley, against a backdrop of rugged cliffs and pine trees. As the first and only traditional spa-inclusive resort in Bhutan, guests of the Sanctuary can enjoy a bespoke programme of treatments in the hands of the in-house medicine doctors.

Colorado, USA

Arriving in Colorado feels a little like setting foot in the Wild West – with copper-red canyons and characterful ranches. Home to the Rocky Mountains, high plains, and desert lands, this scenic state enjoys 300 days of sunshine each year whilst also welcoming snow-seekers to world-renowned ski resorts almost all year round. Its great outdoors are made to be explored, whether on foot, skis, or horseback.

Rawah Ranch, Glendevey…This self-styled ‘dude’ ranch and fly-fishing lodge is straight out of a Western movie – historic Colorado-style cabins in the wild Laramie River Valley. Channel your inner cowboy and ride through thousands of acres of pristine and protected high-country Colorado wilderness.

Lithuania

One of Europe’s best-kept secrets, Lithuania has something of a fairytale feel about it – with tranquil lakes, soaring mountains, and enchanting castles. The countryside is at its most colourful in spring and autumn, but once the snow sets in, the landscape is transformed into a winter wonderland. The five lakes around the small city of Trakai are home to a vast array of wildlife, while its woodlands are designated as a Historical National Park – the only one of its kind in Europe.

Esperanza Resort & SPA, Vilnius…Surrounded by 14 hectares of expansive forests and set beside a beautiful lake, this eco-friendly resort allows guests to make the most of its pristine setting. Spend summer days on forest walks or messing about on the lake. In the winter, snowmobiling, cross-country skiing and ice fishing are just a few of the available activities.

Argentina

Discover ends-of-the-earth luxury in the wilds of Patagonian Argentina, with its wide steppes, grasslands, and dramatic desert scenery where cougars, guanacos, and flamingos roam free. Nature lovers won’t be left wanting in Villa La Angostura, a secluded spot in the beautiful Argentinian Lake District with the snow-dusted Andes in the background. Home to the Los Arrayanes National Park and its extraordinary rare rust-brown coihues and ñires – rumour has it that these trees inspired the imaginary forest in Walt Disney’s Bambi.

Correntoso Lake & River Hotel, Villa La Angostura…Nestled in the shadows of the Andes, this lakeside beauty has a spectacular setting on the shores of Lake Nahuel Huapi. Here, nature meets nurture with rooms that have the most exhilarating lake and mountain views, and guests are perfectly placed for snow, forest and water escapades.

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