nurturing children to be inquisitive and open to the world
The charming thatched cottage, where Enid Blyton wrote many of her much loved books, is on sale
Located a few miles from High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire, Old Thatch was Blyton’s home for nine years from 1929. She began writing her Faraway Tree and Wishing Chair series while living there.
In 1938, when her daughters were aged seven and three, Blyton moved to a new house in Beaconsfield named Green Hedges.
At the end of the Middle Ages, lapis lazuli began to be exported to Europe, where it was ground into powder and made into ultramarine, the finest and most expensive of all blue pigments.
Ultramarine was used by some of the most important artists of the Renaissance and Baroque, including Titian and Vermeer, and was often reserved for the clothing of the central figures of their paintings, especially the Virgin Mary, and symbolized holiness and humility.
Lapis lazuli is a deep blue semi precious stone prized since antiquity for its intense colour.
Lapis lazuli was mined in northeast Afghanistan as early as the 7th millennium BC. Lapis beads have been found at neolithic burials in the Caucasus.
Trumpet vine (Campsis radicans) is spectacular and requires two or three years to establish itself and start blooming. Prune weaker branches from young vines to leave one main stem and branches. When the vine matures, cut the flowering shoots that have grown away from the supported branches back to the main branches in early or late winter. These branches will regrow the next year. Trumpet vine flowers on new growth, so pruning in spring does not affect flowering.
Cut back an old branch or two every year to maintain control. A trumpet vine grown too large and ungainly may be cut to within 12 inches of the ground in late winter to renovate it. Begin training the strongest new shoots to the trellis in spring.
Chinese trumpet vine (Campsis grandifora) is a native of East Asia, China and Japan.
Campsis, or trumpet vine is a self clinging climber grown for its clusters of showy, exotic orange to red or yellow, trumpet shaped flowers.
Karl Froebel was one of the five nephews of Friedrich Froebel, who were educated at the school founded in 1816 at Griesham.
Helene was the daughter of Karl and Johanna Froebel. In 1881 she was an assistant teacher living with her parents at 19 and 20 Moray Place, Edinburgh. Helene (now Helen) Froebel (spinster) was living at 167 and 169 Queens Road, Paddington London as a teacher of Music and German in 1911.
A conversation between Dr. Steven Zucker and Dr. Beth Harris in front of The Art of Painting, Johannes Vermeer, 1666-69, oil on canvas, 130 x 110 cm (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna). Created by Beth Harris and Steven Zucker.
The painting depicts an artist painting a woman dressed in blue posing as a model in his studio. The subject is standing by a window on the wall behind hangs a large map of the Seventeen Provinces of the Netherlands, flanked by 20 views of prominent Dutch cities. It is signed to the right of the girl “I [Oannes] Ver. Meer”.
The representation of the marble tiled floor and the splendid golden chandelier are examples of Vermeer’s craftsmanship and show his knowledge of perspective. Each object reflects or absorbs light differently.
Vermeer obviously liked the painting; he never sold it during his lifetime.
This painting by Vermeer is one of the rare examples of a maid treated in an empathetic and dignified way.
The whitewashed wall and presence of milk indicate the room was a “cool kitchen” used for cooking with dairy products, such as milk and butter. By depicting the act of careful cooking, the Vermeer presents an everyday scene with ethical and social value.
The woman is making bread pudding, which explains the milk and the broken pieces of bread on the table. She would have already made custard in which the bread mixed with egg would be soaking at the moment depicted in the painting. She pours milk to cover the mixture because otherwise the bread, if not simmering in liquid while it is baking, will become an unappetizing, dry crust instead of forming the typical upper surface of the pudding. She is careful in pouring the trickle of milk because bread pudding can be ruined when the ingredients are not accurately measured or properly combined.
These common ingredients and otherwise useless stale bread create a pleasurable product for the household. “Her measured demeanor, modest dress and judiciousness in preparing food conveys eloquently yet unobtrusively one of the strongest values of 17th century Netherlands, domestic virtue”. The depiction of honest, hard work as something romantic in and of itself, elevates the drudgery of housework and servitude to virtuous, even heroic, levels.
An impression of monumentality and a sense of dignity is lent to the image by the choice of a relatively low vantage point and a pyramidal building up of forms from the left foreground to the woman’s head. The painting is built up along two diagonal lines, which meet by the woman’s right wrist and focus the attention of the viewer on the pouring of the milk.
Depicting white walls was a challenge for artists in Vermeer’s time, with his contemporaries using various forms of gray pigment. Here the white walls reflect the daylight with different intensities, displaying the effects of uneven textures on the plastered surfaces. The artist here used white lead, umber and charcoal black. Although the formula was widely known among contemporary painters, no artist more than Vermeer was able to use it so effectively.
Vermeer was twenty five, when he painted this work. The rustic immediacy differs from his later paintings. There is a tactile, visceral quality. You can almost taste the thick, creamy milk escaping the jug, feel the cool dampness of the room and the starchy linen of the maid’s white cap. She is not an apparition or abstraction. She is not the ideal, worldly housewife or the ethereal beauty in Girl with a Pearl Earring.
One of the distinctions of Vermeer’s palette, compared with his contemporaries, was his preference for the expensive natural ultramarine (made from crushed lapis lazuli) where other painters typically used the much cheaper azurite. Along with the ultramarine, lead-tin-yellow is also a dominant color.
The paintings of Johannes Vermeer are now world famous but during his lifetime Vermeer was known only to a small circle of devotees and never attained the same level of fame as other Dutch artists such as Rembrandt. After his death in 1675, Vermeer was quickly forgotten and his works were often misattributed to artists with greater reputations.
The Dutch Golden Age of painting is the 17th century, during and after the later part of the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648) for Dutch independence, which caused large scale transfers of population. The new Dutch Republic was the most prosperous nation in Europe, and led European trade, science, and art.
Dutch artists depended almost exclusively on the open competitive market for their livelihood. Vermeer was elected as the head of the powerful Delft Guild of St Luke two times. His principal patron, Pieter van Ruijven purchased about half of the artist’s output.
Van Ruijven, a wealthy patrician collector who inherited his fortune from his family’s brewery investments, was disqualified from high civic office because of his liberal Remonstrant Protestantism. He married well in 1653 to Maria de Knuijt who brought with her a considerable inheritance. More than one specialist believes that she may have determined to some degree the choice of subjects in Vermeer’s paintings. It is generally held that Van Ruijven’s collection was inherited by Jacob Dissius through his marriage to Van Ruijven’s daughter Magdalena. Upon Dissius’ early death the entire collection was sold in Amsterdam in 1696.
Through an intense breeding program of native flora, botanists provided the Western Australian RSL with a commemorative grevillea (Proteaceae) for the Anzac Centenary. The perennial plants are expected to live 20 to 40 years.
For approximately 10 years, botanists have been running a plant breeding program, which produces native plant varieties for general cultivation.
RSL Spirit of Anzac Grevillea, it is the first hybrid grevillea of the breeding program to be commercially released.
“We wanted a plant that was robust and flowered for a long period, particularly on the 25th of April, Anzac Day.”
The hybridisation program has incorporated classic natives, combining attributes to allow for tough, yet ornamental flora.
Multiple parents add to resilient offspring
The RSL Spirit of Anzac Grevillea has a combination of parents sourced from the Western Australian Wheatbelt, the South Australian desert and the northern New South Wales coast.
“We breed resilience such as disease tolerance, low water requirements, heat tolerance, large flowers, flower colour, floral display, flower period, plant form and leaf shape.”
“Each hybrid will have a different range of these features due to recombination and expression of the parental genes.”
Source: ANZAC grevillea hybrid marks centenary celebrations
On the 25th of April 1915, Australian and New Zealand soldiers formed part of the expedition that set out to capture the Gallipoli peninsula. The objective was to open the Dardanelles to give the British a clear sea route to their ally Russia from the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. There were no easy supply lines to Russia. The North Sea was often frozen and the Far East too distant.
The Gallipoli Campaign lasted nine months before the evacuation of the last Allied troops in January 1916. A year later, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated and Russian involvement in the war ended with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk signed on 3 March 1918.
The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk took away territory that included a quarter of the population and industry of the Russian Empire and nine-tenths of the coal mines.
Jamie Oliver and Cheryl launch a Facebook ‘live’ event featuring chefs from ten countries to encourage viewers to cook healthy dishes from scratch.
Food Revolution Day aims to highlight a global nutrition crisis amongst children.
“Right now if you look at under five year olds, 41 million are obese or overweight, and 159 million are malnourished and not growing physically and mentally in the right way.”
“In the last 40 years we have seen public health go from amazing to terrible.”
The chef has recently triumphed with his campaign for a sugar tax on fizzy drinks.
The British Government used the Queen’s Speech to pledge a new tax on sugar rich fizzy drinks, to be introduced from April 2018.
Source: Jamie Oliver has ‘never been more depressed’ about the state of child health
Access to good, fresh, nutritious food is every child’s human right, but currently we’re failing our children. Millions of kids are eating too much of the wrong food, while millions more don’t get enough of the good stuff to let them grow and thrive. We need to unite as one strong, single voice to force governments and businesses to create a healthier, happier world for the future.
The Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany presented the world with a draft of the Neanderthal genome sequence.
Some 200,000 years ago, our ancestors evolved in East Africa. They spread throughout the rest of the continent and then moved out into Asia and Europe. As they journeyed along coastlines and over mountains, they encountered Neanderthals and other human relatives. Interbreeding was a major feature of human evolution. Billions of people carry sizable chunks of DNA from Neanderthals and other archaic human relatives. Some of those genes may play important roles in our health today.
Sources: How Neanderthal Are You?, Interbreeding With Neanderthals
Joachim Neander (1650 – 31 May 1680) was born in Bremen, the son of a Latin teacher. His grandfather, a musician, had changed the family name from the original Neumann (‘New man’ in English) to the Greek form Neander following the fashion of the time. His most famous hymn is Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, the King of Creation (German: Lobe den Herren, den mächtigen König der Ehren).
In 1671 he became a private tutor in Heidelberg, and in 1674 he became a teacher in a Latin school in Düsseldorf. While living there, he liked to go to the nearby valley of the Düssel river, nature being the inspiration for his poems. The Neandertal (German thal for valley, modernized to tal) was renamed in his honor in the early 19th century, and became famous in 1856 when the remains of the Neanderthal Man (Homo neanderthalensis) were found there.
The name Homo neanderthalensis, “Neanderthal man” was first proposed by the Anglo-Irish geologist William King in 1864.
A zoom into the Hubble Space Telescope photograph of an enormous, bubble being blown into space by a super hot, massive star.
Astronomers trained the iconic telescope on this colorful feature, called the Bubble Nebula, or NGC 7635.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA), F. Summers, G. Bacon, Z. Levay, and L. Frattare (Viz 3D Team, STScI)
The Hubble Space Telescope has been in operation since 1990 when it was launched into low Earth orbit. For the last 25 years it has provided humanity with beautiful, interstellar images of outer space that unravel the mysteries beyond the solar system.
