Hallormsstaðaskógur

2021-08-072021-08-11Sherry Felix

Hallormsstaðaskógur – Wikipedia is by the lake Lagarfljót. Seeing trees on July 16 was a novelty. The country lost most of its trees more than a thousand years ago, when Viking settlers cut down the forests within 50 years for shipbuilding or to clear the land for farming and pasture. The forests originally covered one-quarter of the Iceland. Icelanders are working to get some of those forests back, to improve and stabilize soils, help agriculture, and fight climate change. Iceland is considered the least forested country in Europe. Forests in Iceland are so rare, or their trees so young, that people joke that those lost in the woods only need to stand up.

Hallormsstadur Forest, Northeast Iceland 7/16/2021

Barbara Bryan 2021-08-28 / 10:28 am

Your buttercup photo, amidst all the other tree photos, is particularly exquisite.

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- Sherry Felix 2021-08-28 / 1:04 pm
  
  Thanks Barbara. 🙂
  
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shoreacres 2021-08-07 / 8:11 am

The gray alder bark is really interesting. It was equally interesting to see Engelmann’s name attached to the spruce. One of my favorite Texas wildflowers bears his name, so I did a bit of snooping, and found this in Conifers.org:

“The first botanical description of this species appears in the engaging narrative “Ascent of Pike’s Peak, July 1st, 1862” by C. C. Parry. It includes the first detailed description of Pinus flexilis and the initial report of P. engelmannii, stating

“My attention having been particularly directed to this species by Dr. Engelmann, I became soon satisfied, in pursuing the investigation, that this was in fact a single undescribed species, appearing under different forms according to soil, altitude and exposure; to which, accordingly, I have ventured to affix the name of its actual discoverer, calling it Abies Engelmanni.”

Engelmann, the editor of the Transactions of the St. Louis Academy of Science, published Parry’s letter and later in the same volume (Engelmann 1863) provided the species with a proper botanical description, and placed it in the correct genus.”

Apparently the farthest south the tree grows is Mexico, so it has quite a range.

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- Sherry Felix 2021-08-07 / 8:33 am
  
  Fascinating. Thank you for sharing this information. A lot of the trees in that forest are not native and in the area I was in is more of an arboretum than a forest.
  
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picpholio 2021-08-07 / 5:13 am

Hopefully, with the help of humans, the forests will be able to recover…
Somehow it is frightening that even in the time of the Normans, man was already working (perhaps unknowingly) to damage nature almost irreparably .

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- Sherry Felix 2021-08-07 / 7:58 am
  
  So true. At least some of us are working to undo some of the damage.
  
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derrickjknight 2021-08-07 / 4:08 am

A fine set. I like the textured trunks

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- Sherry Felix 2021-08-07 / 8:00 am
  
  Thanks Derrick. Glad you like the textures too.
  
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