Tag: Trees
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Temple tree
A banyan tree doesn’t start its life from a seed in the ground. Its seed needs another tree or rock or structure to settle on and develop. So it is not a parasite but an epiphyte. In case it develops on a tree, this tree will after some time get completely covered and slowly strangled to…
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Multiple trunk tree
The aerial roots of the banyan tree hang down and when they grow long enough will touch the ground. On that spot itself they may take root in the soil and so continue growing as a semi-independent tree. That’s what we see here, around this banyan in Lucknow. This process can go on and on…
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Ficus benghalensis
Why is the Indian fig tree with its characteristic hanging aerial roots called banyan? That’s an interesting story, which has nothing to do with its sacredness about which I contemplated in last week’s post. Banya seems to be the Gujarati word for merchant. Via the Portuguese and later the English in India the word banyan…
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Sacredness
Banyan trees are often considered sacred. I think this is because they are really awe-inspiring, like the gods themselves. Standing face to face with an extraordinary tree, a towering Sequoia, a corpulent Baobab, a wrinkled olive tree, a ramified Banyan, we easily fall silent. These are creatures that are somehow beyond our comprehension. Maybe that’s…
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Natura Artis Magistra
With this title I am not aiming at the Zoo in Amsterdam, but at the meaning of the words: nature is the teacher of art. Nature as source of inspiration for the arts. I took the photo just outside the wall of Chisaku-in, a temple in Kyoto. It looks like a nice piece of untouched…
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Ελαιώνας
Eleonas is the Greek word for olive grove. There is a real ancient one on the island of Aegina with trees of 500 and a single one even over 1500 years old. What amazing creatures! Having reached such a respectable age, all twisted and grooved and gnarled and knotty, this is not to be seen as…
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Still waters …
run deep. That’s indeed the impression we get when looking at them from the right perspective, as we did in last week’s post when looking down at Diamond Lake. But here, standing at the overgrown shore of the lake, all we see in its still waters is but reflection. We even cannot make out the…
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Composition
Every photo is, of course, a composition, marked by the choice of what to include within the four sides of the picture and what to leave out. Light and colour also come into play. The photographer may or may not be fully aware of these factors, but they do play their part. Here it was the…
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Tap tap!
That is what you hear in the pine forest when the man who collects the resin from the trees fixes the cone back on the stem. Then he moves to the next tree, empties the cone, puts it back, tap tap, and he goes on to the next. The resin is used for making turpentine.…
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The sheltering tree
Mozambique 1993, breathing more freely again after many years of devastating conflict and war. A tree. Branches and foliage spreading in a grand circle up around the trunk. In its shelter underneath some hundred women assembled, with children and a few men. There is a spirit of calm, of peace, of community about the place.…
καιρός remembered 