Frost…can there be anything more ephemeral than frost?
…ummm…our presence on earth?
🙂 Let me try again. The humour in this reality?
Once more…the pleasure as I observed the morning frost on that wood bench in the Schynige Platte Botanical Alpine Garden? Is that better? 🙂
Sweet pleasure. Ephemeral. Always sought. Always welcomed. Always missed.
And then I stood up, took a long, slow, deep breath, and turned around…I understood.
I was born in and grew up in large cities–Detroit, Chicago and Cleveland. With that big-city-supermarket-only detachment, I still look at farm life as a Disneyland attraction. City soft hands vs farm rough hands–same mentality.
But last week I, by chance, attended an Alpabzug held in a village in the Berner Oberland, Jungfrau Region, Switzerland.
Alpabzug und Chästeilet! says with exclamatory enthusiasm, we are having a party to celebrate our cows’ return home from the Alpine summer pastures and their cheese distribution.
The Alpabzug is a village festival where the people in the village come out on the main street to a parade of cows that welcomes the cows back home after their season up in the mountains. It is a jolly time.
The parade, led by trychlers (bell-ringers) finishes on the edge of town for a day long festival where people take photos of the cows’ head-dresses, enjoy each others’ company, jodelers, traditional music, eat chäsbraetli (raclette on bread) and buy the cheese made that year on the mountain.
The parade through the village reached the festival ground where the residents gathered to appreciate the cows with a party.
Village families make close relationships with the cows.
Farmers make decorative head dresses for the cows.
Decorative craftsmanship demonstrates human respect paid to the cows.
Open-faced raclette cheese sandwiches enjoyed by more than a hundred people.
The cheese from this summer has been brought for distribution to the village residents.
Each farmer has summer cheese displayed and ready for taste testing.
This season’s cheese, muetschli, for sale at 22CHF/kg is sold alongside jellies and jams made from local fruits and berries.
I like how the production and consumption of food is an intimate part of village life. I am amazed that it is still occurring as a village event—not a tourist event.
In my idealistic interpretation, I see the people thanking the cows for the milk given to produce the cheese that will be eaten throughout the wintertime.
What is the way it is said—local food by and for local people. 🙂
No Entry…Gentiana asclepiadea
Enter At Your Own Risk…Gentiana asclepiadea
What might you find inside? Only you can know. 🙂
Your path is in front of you.
A new path on your journey. Discover what happens to you at the edges of the clouds.
Take the path. Explore. Discover. It’s free. 🙂
Someone prepared for the journey…er…or a long trip…
…with, along the way to autumn…pearls of the woods.
And, it is never twice the same. Never.
Locus iste–place holder is a place holder.
…just beyond the edge of the meadow, in the dark, thick and ancient forest, is the history of everything you never wanted to know.
But fear not. Just start walking.
From a distance, it’s hard to see, but the waves carry it in the air…from that huge bowl of a valley…the pastures.
Closer, pastures rolling up and rolling across the slopes, the fields. My eyes and nose battle to receive their outpouring.
Invisible micro-whisps rising, swirling…they enter my nose, uninvited, confusing my sense of beauty with olfactory complexities; but then my receptors are overtaxed and I can receive no more—so I look and my eyes gradually suffer the same fate.
Why are these pleasures time-stamped? Am I being protected from following some forbidden sensual path into the home of these glorious plants?
Just a question. Because I will visit these pastures again tomorrow and for a brief moment share their waves of ecstasies.
…the changing of the airs…
There are days when I look across the valley and see flows of clouds, flows of clouds I do not understand. Right side of the brain…nil. Left side of the brain…nil.
Yet, I am entranced by the beauties of the flows…
Other days, I wake up, eager to see those flows…and I find…what might as well be infinitely far away…something in that distance…all by itself…sigh.
…and it begins…
I sigh confronted by beauty I can not fathom. Clouds…if I can not grasp them in my hands, how can I describe them? How can I write about them?
Suggestions?
The history of the Interlaken landscape before river channel control was one of a swamp as the Lutschine and Lombach emptied huge Alpine catchments into this flat land adjacent to the Aare River.
Up the valleys Grindelwald, Lauterbrunnen, Saxeten and Lombach where swampiness was not a problem, people have for centuries managed arable land to support their families. Particularly in the Grindelwald area, there are seven centuries of written records documenting how they managed the landscape.
So this region has a tradition of agriculture, crop and animal management in family scale over the lands from Alpine heights to valley floors. The following series of images show how the Interlaken neighborhoods now follow that same tradition of small land management and family food gardens today.
Most families dedicate a patch for seasonal vegetables close to their house.
Veg, flowers, and a place to sit outside.
This ‘front yard’ is 80% mixed garden, with little strip of grass–maybe for a pet.
A garden filled with healthy plants speaks of health and commitment to neighbors and passersby.
When the yard is large enough, there will be found a fruit tree. If even larger, a nut tree.
Each homeowner finds unique balance with the plantings of flowers, fruits, herbs and vegetables.
Municipal water supply for allotment gardens for people who have no gardening space at home.
In the allotments, beauty comes from sweat equity. Healthy allotment gardens are the best of public realm commitments–people and plants in harmony–heart warming it is.
Past the edge of town is a rural landscape with small scale patches of crops.
Small scale farming climbs up the slopes becoming pastures which are grazed and/or cut for animals.
Villages are densely built in the foreground. Pastures in the middle ground with barns for storing hay.
I just can’t stop including more images of healthy veg gardens next to homes–such a fulfilling feeling.
In this image is a public path on the right–and one heck of a healthy veg garden to the left. Tell me that is not a beautiful and inspiring landscape?!
Pasture in the foreground, veg in middle ground, flowers and home in the background. Nuf said.
Fruit trees and crops right up to the edge of town, then each home with its own veg and flower garden. It is not ideology, not theory. It is fact. It is the result of people understanding plants, gardens and landscapes through their own hard work and intelligence.
