Lady with an Ermine (Portrait of Cecilia Gallerani) ( ; ) is a painting by Leonardo da Vinci. It was painted between 1489 and 1490. The subject of the portrait is Cecilia Gallerani, the mistress of Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan. Leonardo was in the service of the Duke at the time the portrait was painted. The ermine was a symbol of purity for Leonardo. "Lady with an Ermine" is displayed in the Czartoryski Museum, Kraków, Poland.
Mixed forest
Mixed forests are a temperate and humid biome. The forests have four layers. The uppermost layer is the forest canopy of tall, mature trees from 33 to 66 m (100 to 200 feet) high.
Below the canopy is the three-layered understory, about 9 to 15 m (30 to 50 feet) shorter than the canopy. The top layer of the understory has smaller mature trees, saplings. There are also suppressed juvenile canopy layer trees waiting for an opening in the canopy. Below the sub-canopy is the shrub layer of low-growing woody plants. Most of the time, the lowest growing (and most diverse) layer is the ground cover or herbaceous layer.
Ancient woodland
Ancient woodland is the name used in the United Kingdom for woodland which has existed continuously since 1600 or before in England and Wales (or 1750 in Scotland). Before those dates, planting of new woodland was uncommon, so a wood present in 1600 was likely to have developed naturally. The American name for these forests is "old growth forest".
For many species of animal and plant, ancient woodland sites provide the only habitat. For many others, conditions on these sites are much more suitable than those on other sites. Ancient woodland in the UK, like rainforest in the tropics, is home to rare and threatened species, more than any other UK habitat. For these reasons ancient woodland is often described as an irreplaceable resource, or 'critical natural capital'.
Ancient woodland is formally defined on maps by Natural England and equivalent bodies. Many ancient woodlands have legal protection, but an ancient woodland is not automatically protected.
Bluebell wood
A bluebell wood is a woodland that in springtime has a carpet of flowering bluebells ("Hyacinthoides non-scripta") underneath a newly forming leaf canopy. The thicker the summer canopy, the more the ground-cover is suppressed. This encourages a dense carpet of bluebells, whose leaves mature and die down by early summer.
Bluebell woods may be found in all parts of Great Britain and Ireland, as well as elsewhere in Europe. Bluebells are a common indicator species for ancient woodlands, so bluebell woods are likely to date back to at least 1600.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, one of the romantic poets, was very keen on bluebells, as his poem "May Magnificat" shows.
<poem>And azuring-over greybell makes
Wood banks and brakes wash wet like lakes</poem>
In his journal entry for 9 May 1871 Hopkins says:
In the little wood opposite the light they stood in blackish spreads or sheddings like spots on a snake. The heads are then like thongs and solemn in grain and grape-colour. But in the clough through the light they come in falls of sky-colour washing the brows and slacks of the ground with vein-blue, thickening at the double, vertical themselves and the young grass and brake-fern combed vertical, but the brake struck the upright of all this with winged transomes. It was a lovely sight. - The bluebells in your hand baffle you with their inscape, made to every sense. If you draw your fingers through them they are lodged and struggle with a shock of wet heads; the long stalks rub and click and flatten to a fan on one another like your fingers themselves would when you passed the palms hard across one another, making a brittle rub and jostle like the noise of a hurdle strained by leaning against; then there is the faint honey smell and in the mouth the sweet gum when you bite them.
Ardennes
Ardennes might mean:
Ardennes (forest)
The Ardennes (also known as Ardennes Forest) is a mountain range in eastern Belgium (eastern Wallonia), northern Luxembourg (the Oesling) and bordering France (Ardennes (department)).
It consist of hills of an altitude up to nearly 700 meters. It has many forests and few people.
The Ardennes are primarily made of slate, and borders in the east at the German Eifel. Important river is the Meuse.
Ginevra de' Benci
Ginevra de' Benci is an oil on wood painting by Leonardo da Vinci. The painting was made by Leonardo in 1479-1480. It hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. It is the only Leonardo on view in the United States.
Auguste Jean Baptiste Chevalier
Auguste Jean Baptiste Chevalier was a French botanist, and explorer of tropical Africa, especially of French Africa and Côte d'Ivoire.
Chevalier was born on 23 June 1873 in Domfront, a town in Orne, Lower Normandy, France. His family had a small farm in Normandy and he studied first in Domfront and then in Caen.
He finished high school in 1891 and began to study at Caen University and, in 1893, Élie Antoine Octave Lignier, botanist at the university, put him in charge of making the catalog of the university herbarium.
After his military service in 1894, he got his degree in natural sciences in 1896 and he began to work with the botanist Charles Eugene Bertrand at the University of Lille. In 1897, he got a scholarship, allowing him to enter the botanical laboratory of Philippe Van Tieghem at the National Museum of Natural History. From 1899 to 1900, he was part of a scientific travel to Sudan.
Chevalier got a doctorate in 1901 and then made many scientific travels, mainly to Africa but also to tropical Asia and to South America. He became an assistant in the Colonial Agriculture Laboratory of the "École pratique des hautes études" (an establishment of research and higher education); in 1907 he became the deputy director of the institution and then in 1912 was made director of it.
In 1921, he began publishing the journal "Revue de Botanique Appliquée", in French, where he wrote many articles.
In 1929 he was made professor of crop production at the National Museum of Natural History of France; he remained here until his retirement in 146. He became a member of the French Academy of Sciences in 1937.
After his death in 1956, the Domfront municipality gave his name to the high school of the city in 1959.
Partial list of articles and books of Auguste Chevalier:
Fatin Shidqia
Fatin Shidqia Lubis (born in Jakarta, 30 July 1996) is an Indonesia singer. She won the talent show "X Factor Indonesia".
Oh! Susanna
"Oh! Susanna" is a song by Stephen Foster. It was Foster's first hit song. The song debuted in the Eagle Ice Cream Saloon in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on September 11, 1847 and was published by W. C. Peters of Cincinnati, Ohio in 1848. It became the unofficial anthem of the California Gold Rush in 1849.
Foster had little appreciation of the worth of his songs. His brother Morrison wrote: "While in Cincinnati [Stephen] wrote "Oh, Susanna", a song which soon became famous ... There was then in Cincinnati in the music business, W. C. Peters, whom Stephen had known in Pittsburgh, and who had taught music in our family ... [Stephen] made a present of "Old Uncle Ned" and "Oh, Susanna" to Mr. Peters. The latter made ten thousand dollars out of them, and established a music publishing house which became the largest in the West. The fame of these two songs went around the world, and thousands sang and played them who never heard the name of the author or whence they came."
Pilliga forest
The State Forests of The Pilliga, also called the Pilliga Scrub, covers an area of 3000 km in north-central New South Wales, Australia. It is the largest area of semi-arid woodland in the state. The forest is near the towns of Baradine and Narrabri and the villages of Pilliga and Gwabegar.