Archive for 12/02/2013
First off, thanks to Tamara and all the readers of My Botanical Garden who have been visiting and posting comments. It has been a pleasure being able to cross pollinating between blogs and to hear from some new readers! Today – the last installment in the three-part series on the vegetation of Tierra del Fuego.
Darwin’s diary remains quiet today, but in the January/February section of this Zoological Notebook he has quite a bit to say about the dominant vegetation of the other major ecosystem of southwestern Tierra del Fuego – the Magellanic moorlands (I love that name – I think it is my new favorite place).
Again, let me turn the floor over to Darwin to set the stage:
“In every part of the country which I have seen, the land is covered by a thick bed of peat.— It is universal in the mountains, above the limits [of]…
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The Pena National Palace (Palácio Nacional da Pena) is a Romanticist palace in Sintra, Portugal. The palace stands on the top of a hill above the town of Sintra, and on a clear day it can be easily seen from Lisbon. It is a national monument and constitutes one of the major expressions of 19th century Romanticism in the world. The palace is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the ‘Seven Wonders of Portugal’.
Pena Palace Park is a vast forested area completely surrounding the Pena Palace, spreading for over 200 hectares of uneven terrain. The park was created at the same time as the palace by King Ferdinand II, who was assisted in the task by the Baron von Eschwege and the Baron von Kessler. The exotic taste of the Romanticism was applied to the park as it was to the palace. The king ordered trees from diverse, distant lands to be planted there. Those included North American Sequoia, Lawson’s cypress, Magnolia, and Western Red Cedar, Chinese Ginkgo, Japanese Cryptomeria and a wide variety of ferns and tree ferns from Australia and New Zealand, concentrated in the Queen’s Fern Garden (Feteira da Rainha). The park has a labyrinthine system of paths and narrow roads, connecting the palace to the many points of interest throughout the park, as well as to its two gated exits.
Source: Wikipedia