The first tree huggers were 294 men and 69 women belonging to the Bishnois branch of Hinduism, who, in 1730, died while trying to protect the trees in their village from being turned into the raw material for building a palace. They literally clung to the trees, while being slaughtered by the foresters. But their action led to a royal decree prohibiting the cutting of trees in any Bishnoi village. And now those villages are virtual wooded oases amidst an otherwise desert landscape.
Not only that, the Bishnois inspired the Chipko movement (chipko means “to cling” in Hindi) that started in the 1970s, when a group of peasant women in the Himalayan hills of northern India threw their arms around trees designated to be cut down. Within a few years, this tactic, also known as tree satyagraha, had spread across India, ultimately forcing reforms in forestry and a moratorium on tree felling in Himalayan regions.
Source: goo.gl/HTyZEj
Photo: The village women of the Chipko movement in the early 70’s in the Garhwal Hills of India, protecting the trees from being cut down.(Collected from Eirik Duke’s Facebook ID)

Ambrosius Bosschaert the Elder was born on 18th January in 1573. In this still life tulips, roses, jonquils, carnations, fritillaries and a single blue iris are massed into a Chinese vase; costly flowers in a costly container. Above them all, Madonna lilies rise like shining white trumpets at the peak of the bouquet, made slightly less regal by the tiny beetle making its way up a spotless petal. Other insects play hide-and-seek in the shadows made by leaves. The picture was probably made to impress one of the wealthy burghers of Middelburg, the prosperous town where the artist lived. Such a person would have had an interest in, even a passion for, the many exotic plants being grown in the town’s new botanical gardens. So Bosschaert’s work is more than a lovely picture. He shows individual specimens of great value and scientific interest, and the buyer and their guests would have had their magnifying glasses out to indulge themselves in the ’science of looking’: https://bit.ly/3q9y39v
Tulips, roses, jonquils, our Bosschaert gift range matches the colours and floral themes from his still life paintings.
(Collected from National Gallery’s Facebook page)