A few good vertical grinding images I found:
lost
Image by paul bica
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The Beth Chatto Gardens – A Small Bit of Light Releaf!
Image by antonychammond
One particular of the greats of British gardening, Beth Chatto OBE has entered the realm of national treasuredom. Plants-lady, designer, author, 10-time gold-medal winner at Chelsea, holder of the Royal Horticultural Society’s Victoria Medal of Honour and, of course, the owner of the celebrated Beth Chatto Gardens at Elmstead Market, close to Colchester, in Essex – her horticultural abilities seem boundless. With the idea of “right plant, proper place” – in other words, put a plant in circumstances close to its organic habitat and it will thrive without assist – running as a thread throughout her profession, she has inspired a generation of gardeners to take their lead from nature.
The garden has been the inspiration for several of her influential books, like The Dry Garden (1978), The Damp Garden (1992) and Beth Chatto’s Gravel Garden (2000). It was designed on land that was previously component of a fruit farm, owned by her late husband, Andrew, 14 years her senior, whom she married in 1943. “We met in the course of the war,” she says. “I was a schoolgirl of about 17, contemplating going to college.”
A scholarly man, who died in 1999 after suffering from emphysema for 25 years, Andrew devoted significantly of his life to investigation into plant habitats. Chatto says it was he who inspired her interest in gardening and refers to him often, modestly deferring to his superior knowledge. “He’s such an essential influence in my life,” she says. “My parents had been keen, but they had a conventional garden, using mostly cultivars.”
The couple lived initially in his parents’ in Colchester, but in the late 1950s moved to a modernist property they’d built on the edge of the farm – exactly where Chatto nevertheless lives these days. Even inside, the garden is a continual presence. Large windows frame views and vignettes of the planting on each side and invite a tapestry of textures, colours and shapes into the residence.
Chatto credits her husband almost totally for her success. “My two daughters have been teenagers just before I started to think about generating a company,” she says. “Andrew had looked after us and offered me the safety and freedom to experiment.” Her husband’s failing overall health and the trials of running a fruit farm concentrated her mind on establishing the garden commercially, even though what we see right now took time to emerge.
“For the very first seven or eight years, a lot of the land was a wilderness,” she recalls. But there had been assets, also, not least a rare natural water supply in the drought-prone east of Essex, exactly where rainfall can be as small as 20in a year. “There were a couple of fine 300-year-old oaks and a spring-fed ditch ran through the hollow.” Nowadays, the ornamental gardens cover about 5 acres a further 10 are occupied by the nursery, which opened in 1967, and functioning areas.
Locating water was not the only challenge. “There was land that was so dry, the native weeds curled up and died. That eventually became my gravel garden,” she says. This she designed in 1991, on the internet site of a car park. Apart from watering in the young, drought-tolerant plants in the course of the first year, she has never artificially irrigated it.
Chatto has a knack for turning problem regions into an asset, and there are numerous distinct regions in the garden, every requiring a distinct approach. The huge water gardens are dominated by a series of ponds surrounded by bog plants and swathes of lush grass. A extended, shady stroll runs parallel to 1 of the boundaries. Here, shade-tolerant planting – such as ferns, tiarella and pulmonaria – carpet the ground beneath oaks and other specimen trees added by Chatto. By contrast, the gravel region is a mass of sun-loving perennials, with asters, rudbeckias and sedums glowing by way of hazy grasses.
The garden might have started out to give pleasure to a household, but it has created into a self-contained horticultural powerhouse, attracting visitors from all over the world – about 40,000 a year. “It’s like sowing an acorn, which is my symbol,” says Chatto. “I have an acorn and an oak tree on a climate vane, which was a superb present from my staff.” Incredibly, it is tended by only one complete-time and 4 element-time gardeners and volunteers – many of whom are foreign students. Chatto remains resolutely hands-on and is keen to pass on the understanding she has gained via expertise.
Chatto utilizes grasses brilliantly, and was doing so extended before it became trendy. She creates seemingly effortless but completely satisfying combinations. Therein lies her genius – there may possibly be others out there with an equal understanding of plants, but no one else has her eye. Shape, scale, proportion, texture, colour – all are balanced with the skill of a plate-spinner.
She also factors in horticultural considerations – how big a plant will get, how quickly or gradually it will develop, what circumstances it wants to thrive and how it is maintained. The outcome is a garden that functions on each and every level – practical, horticultural and aesthetic – with layer upon layer of meticulously placed plants, as enticing asmillefeuillepastry. It all appears completely uncontrived, but, on closer inspection, one particular notices geometric lines and angles. The big picture is constructed up steadily, with tiny groupings of 3 or much more plants forming a satisfying melange of verticals and horizontals, and fluffy and strong plants. “I require the trees and shrubs to form a background, to paint the sky and lead the eye upwards towards the clouds,” Chatto explains. “Then one adds the embroidery, which I take pleasure in so considerably.” Nothing is allowed to get out of hand, but stagnation is not an selection, either. “A garden is not a picture hanging on a wall,” she says. “It modifications not only from hour to hour, week to week or month to month, but from year to year.”
Chatto has certainly noticed the effects of climate change. Drought is absolutely nothing new in her part of the world, where (the past two years aside) there is often no rain for up to ten weeks in the summer. “The most interesting change is the lack of cold climate,” she says. “Only ten years ago, we had icicles hanging down, and when the young children were small, they utilised to skate. Now we hardly have enough ice to bear a duck.” From an report by Rachel de Thame
Please go to www.bethchatto.co.uk/ for additional data about this inspirational gardener and garden.
Daybreak at Gale Crater
Image by NASA Goddard Photo and Video
On Saturday, November 26, NASA is scheduled to launch the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission featuring Curiosity, the largest and most sophisticated rover ever sent to the Red Planet.
The Curiosity rover bristles with several cameras and instruments, like Goddard’s Sample Analysis at Mars (SAM) instrument suite. By looking for proof of water, carbon, and other critical building blocks of life in the Martian soil and atmosphere, SAM will assist find out no matter whether Mars ever had the possible to help life. Curiosity will be delivered to Gale crater, a 96-mile-wide crater that contains a record of environmental adjustments in its sedimentary rock, in August 2012.
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This pc-generated view depicts component of Mars at the boundary between darkness and daylight, with an location which includes Gale Crater beginning to catch morning light.
Gale Crater looms in the distance, distinguished from adjacent craters by its central mountain of strata. Gale Crater straddles the dichotomy boundary of Mars, which separates the broad, flat, and young northern plains from the a lot older and rougher southern highlands. There is evidence that water may possibly have flowed across this topographic boundary, from highland to lowland, possibly pooling locally inside Gale Crater and forming the lowermost strata that fill the crater.
Northward is to the left. Gale is the crater with a mound inside it near the center of the image. NASA has selected Gale as the landing internet site for the Mars Science Laboratory mission. The mission’s rover will be placed on the ground in a northern portion of Gale Crater in August 2012.
Gale Crater is 96 miles (154 kilometers) in diameter and holds a layered mountain increasing about three miles (five kilometers) above the crater floor. The intended landing website is at four.five degrees south latitude, 137.4 degrees east longitude.
This view was developed making use of three-dimensional info from the Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter, which flew on NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor orbiter. The vertical dimension is not exaggerated. Colour information is primarily based on basic Mars colour traits.
The Mars Orbiter Laser Altimeter was operated by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, managed the Mars International Surveyor and now manages the Mars Science Laboratory for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center enables NASA’s mission through 4 scientific endeavors: Earth Science, Heliophysics, Solar System Exploration, and Astrophysics. Goddard plays a top role in NASA’s accomplishments by contributing compelling scientific information to advance the Agency’s mission.
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