Jess

Lover of all things wild and free! 🇭🇰🇬🇧 Busy foraging, dancing, farming, travelling, filming, editing and planting trees, in no particular order! 🤷🏻‍♀️

[peaklass @peaklass1]

It's a simple scene, as so many of mine are, but I can't tell you how much my heart is lifted by the sight of fields full of wildflowers, scattered with barns. I wish you could have also heard the cuckoo calling and the bees buzzing as I stood here, and felt the sunshine on your face. Sometimes all you need in life is an old wooden gate to lean on, and the English countryside in June.

📍 Peak District, England

[ClarksonsFarm @ClarksonsFarm1]

His genius is astonishing

[Albert Dros @albertdrosphoto]

Dewdrop details on the blooming heather in the Netherlands.

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

There is a rule in Florence that has not been broken in over five hundred years: nothing in the city may be built taller than a dome finished in 1436.

The dome belongs to the cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore, and it is the work of Filippo Brunelleschi.

When you look at a photograph of Florence and notice that its skyline seems strangely, impossibly intact, you are not imagining it...

The city has protected that view, by custom and by law, since the Renaissance. To this day, no building in Florence is permitted to rise higher than the cupola.

What it guards is one of the most astonishing structures ever built. When Brunelleschi began in 1420, no one in Europe knew how to raise a dome that wide. The technology had been lost with the Romans. The cathedral had stood for decades with a hole in its roof, because the span was considered impossible to cover, and the city had essentially gambled that someone would one day work out how.

Brunelleschi built it without the wooden scaffolding everyone assumed was necessary, laying over four million bricks in a self-supporting double shell, one dome inside another, in a herringbone pattern that let each ring hold itself up as it rose.

Six centuries later, it remains the largest masonry dome in the world. Nothing built since, in brick and stone, has surpassed it.

The Italian director Franco Zeffirelli, who was born in Florence, once explained what that means to him. "When I feel depression creeping in," he said, "I return to Florence to gaze at Brunelleschi's dome. If human genius was able to achieve something so great, then I too can and must try to create, to act, to live."

That is what a skyline can be when a city decides that beauty is worth protecting...

I write a weekly newsletter for over 50,000 people who love rediscovering the beauty of the past. You can join us for free at the link below, and if you'd like to support my work, a paid subscription is what makes it possible:

https://t.co/hgJUdR0jlx

Thanks for reading.

[Emma Mitchell 💙 @silverpebble]

In a field near Wicken, Cambridgeshire larkspur is grown for London florists along with cornflowers & Nigella. It’s quite a sight just now-some floral dopamine for you 🌿:

[Sue Wood @SW_PhotoNature]

The evening sun reflects on the poppy petals, giving Handsome hare that ‘blushed’ look 🥰

[Sammi🦋 @StoriesBySammi]

There are only 236 of them left on Earth. Every single one has a name.

The kākāpō is the world's heaviest parrot - a mossy green, owl-faced bird the size of a small dog that cannot fly, may live to 90 years, and only breeds every 2 to 4 years when New Zealand's rimu trees produce enough fruit to trigger the urge.

Rats. Cats. Stoats. Humans clearing forests. The kākāpō never evolved to outrun any of them.

By 1995, 51 birds remained. Scientists, rangers, and Ngāi Tahu - the Māori people who have always known this bird as taonga, a treasure—evacuated every last one to predator-free islands.

Each bird got a transmitter. Each nest watched around the clock.

This past February 14th, the first kākāpō chick in four years hatched. They named her Tīwhiri. By spring, 59 chicks had been born.

236 birds. Every name known. Every nest watched.

Who's counting down the days until the rimu trees fruit again? 🦜

#DemsUnited #Nature

[CooperBaggs 💰🍞 @edgaralandough]

NOBODY WARNED ME AT 32. SO I'M WARNING YOU.
(Write these down. Save them. Screenshot them.)

1. Your parents are not background characters.

[Impressions @impression_ists]

Apple Tree by Gustav Klimt

[Scott @Havenlust]

Art of Claude Monet

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Seahorses dance with their partners every morning to strengthen the bond between them

[𝕐o̴g̴ @Yoda4ever]

Mama manatee giving hugs to her baby..🐾😍

[𝑙𝑦𝑟𝑎 @naturehealyou]

When bees run out of energy, they fall asleep in flowers

[Scott @Havenlust]

“I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.”

Claude Monet

[Nature is Phenomenal @AnimalGeoLife]

Unforgettable Moments With Iceland's Most Majestic Horses 🐎

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Little duckling drinking water on a lotus leaf

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Juvenile kestrels surprised by a butterfly.

[Oceaiii🐋🐬 @oceaiii]

A gentle giant cruising right by the shoreline. 🌊 It’s hard to comprehend the pure scale of a blue whale until you see it juxtaposed against the rocks like this. Nature at its most majestic.

[Elle Lookbook @EvaLovesDesign]

Color inspiration

[Emma Mitchell 💙 @silverpebble]

A couple of cornflowers in a field near Wicken, Cambridgeshire and a little leafcutter bee gathering pollen for her babies from a cornflower in my garden. As ever my photos & videos are designed to dial down stress & lift your mood-a break from angst while you scroll 🌿: