OpenSpace

Natural Beauty

Every part of the flower is useful. There is nothing to waste with a sun-flower. While growing they are beau-tiful to look at and later the leaves can be used as cattle feed.

Seeds (have the shell on) and seed kernels (the part inside the shell) can be eaten or used for cooking and for extracting oil. Like most agricultural crops the fields are rotated. So if you have a special area for viewing these majestic giants keep in mind that they will not be found in the same fields two years in row.

Seed kernels can be ground into flour which the American Indians did and which is still done in Germany for use in breads. If you have a coffee grinder you can grind the kernels yourself to add to pancakes and muffins. Small food processors can also be used but they can easily over grind these small kernels so process for only a short pe-riod of time. I frequently add whole kernels to whole wheat bread.

Are the kernels good for you? YES! Besides lifting your spirit with their beauty, they contain B-complex vita-mins, vitamin E, folic acid and min-erals such as phosphorous, iron, and selenium.

Do I have a passion for photographing sunflowers? Yes, and I hope you enjoy each of these photos from France.

You will note a difference in color of the sunflowers. Those with the pure lemony yellow color with soft green leaves and rolling hills in the back-ground were in the southern part of Burgundy Region while the others were in the Poitou-Charentes Region. The Poitou-Charentes was particu-larly hot that year and the sunflowers were a bit stressed looking while in the Burgundy Region the year before the weather was cool enough for a light jacket most mornings and evenings!

The perfect Picture

The name “France” comes from the Latin Francia, which means “country of the Franks”.[18] There are various theories as to the origin of the name Franks: one is that it is derived from the Proto-Germanic word frankon which translates as javelin or lance as the throwing axe of the Franks was known as a francisca.[19] Anoth-er proposed etymology is that in an ancient Germanic language, Frank means free as opposed to slave.[cita-tion needed]

According to Czech historian, David Solomon Ganz, the country takes its name from Franci (Francio), one of the Germanic kings of Sicambri in circa 61 BCE, and whose dominion extended all along those lands imme-diately joining the west-bank of the Rhine River, as far as Strasbourg and Belgium.[20] This nation is explicit-ly mentioned by Julius Caesar in his Notebooks on the Gallic War (Com-mentarii de Bello Gallico), as is Fran-cio in the Chronicle of Fredegar.

The Franks embraced the Christian Gallo-Roman culture and ancient Gaul was eventually renamed Francia (“Land of the Franks”). The Germanic Franks adopted Romanic languages, except in north Gaul where Roman settlements were less dense and where Germanic languages emerged. Clovis made Paris his capital and established the Merovingian dynasty, but his king-dom would not survive his death. The Franks treated land purely as a private possession and divided it among their

Broken Land

In 1940 France was invaded and occupied by Nazi Germany. Metropolitan France was divided into a German occupation zone in the north and Vichy France, a newly established authoritarian regime collaborating with Germany, in the south, while Free France, the government-in-ex-ile led by Charles de Gaulle, was set up in London.[55] The Vichy government es-tablished a system of concentration camps in France and from 1942 to 1944, about 160,000 French citizens, including around 75,000 Jews,[56][57][58] were deported to death camps and concentration camps in Germany and Poland.[59] On June 6,

1944 the Allies invaded Normandy and in August they invaded southern France. Over the following year the Allies and the French Resistance emerged victorious over the Axis powers and French sover-eignty was restored with the establish-ment of the Provisional Government of the French Republic (GPRF). This inter-im government, established by de Gaulle, aimed to continue to wage war against Germany and to purge collaborators from office. It also made several important re-forms (suffrage extended to women, crea-tion of the Social security, founding of the École nationale d’administration).

World War II (WWII or WW2), also known as the Second World War, was a global war that lasted from 1939 to 1945, though related conflicts began earlier. It involved the vast majority of the world’s nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis. It was the most widespread war in history, and di-rectly involved more than 100 million people from over 30 countries. In a state of “total war”, the major partic-ipants threw their entire economic, industrial and scientific capabilities behind the war effort, erasing the dis-tinction between civilian and military resources. Marked by mass deaths of civilians, including the Holocaust (during which approximately 11 mil-lion people were killed)[1][2] and the strategic bombing of industrial and

population centres (during which ap-proximately one million people were killed, including the use of two nucle-ar weapons in combat),[3] it resulted in an estimated 50 million to 85 mil-lion fatalities. These made World War II the deadliest conflict in human his-tory.

The Empire of Japan aimed to dom-inate Asia and the Pacific and was already at war with the Republic of China in 1937,[5] but the world war is generally said to have begun on 1 Sep-tember 1939[6] with the invasion of Poland by Germany and subsequent declarations of war on Germany by France and the United Kingdom. From late 1939 to early 1941, in a se-ries of campaigns and treaties, Ger-many conquered or controlled much of continental Europe, and formed

the Axis alliance with Italy and Japan. Following the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, Germany and the Soviet Union partitioned and annexed territories of their European neighbours, including Poland, Finland and the Baltic states. The United Kingdom and the British Commonwealth were the only Allied forces continuing the fight against the Axis, with campaigns in North Africa and the Horn of Africa as well as the long-running Battle of the Atlantic. In June 1941, the European Axis powers launched an invasion of the Soviet Un-ion, opening the largest land theatre of war in history, which trapped the major part of the Axis’ military forces into a War of Attrition. In December 1941, Japan attacked the United States and European territories in the Pacific Ocean, and quickly conquered much of the Western Pacific.

Buried Arts

Hidden in Plain sight

The Axis advance halted in 1942 when Japan lost the critical Battle of Mid-way, near Hawaii, and Germany was defeated in North Africa and then, decisively, at Stalingrad in the Soviet Union. In 1943, with a series of Ger-man defeats on the Eastern Front, the Allied invasion of Italy which brought about Italian surrender, and Allied victories in the Pacific, the Axis lost the initiative and undertook strategic retreat on all fronts. In 1944, the West-ern Allies invaded France, while the Soviet Union regained all of its territo-rial losses and invaded Germany and its allies. During 1944 and 1945 the Japanese suffered major reverses in mainland Asia in South Central China and Burma, while the Allies crippled the Japanese Navy and captured key.

Hidden in Plain sight

The war in Europe ended with an in-vasion of Germany by the Western Allies and the Soviet Union culminat-ing in the capture of Berlin by Soviet and Polish troops and the subsequent German unconditional surrender on 8 May 1945. Following the Pots-dam Declaration by the Allies on 26 July 1945, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 August and 9 August respectively. With an in-vasion of the Japanese archipelago im-minent, the possibility of additional atomic bombings, and the Soviet Un-ion’s declaration of war on Japan and invasion of Manchuria, Japan surren-dered on 15 August 1945. Thus ended the war in Asia, and the final destruc-tion of the Axis bloc.

Filling in The pieces

World War I had radically altered the political map, with the defeat of the Central Powers—including Aus-tria-Hungary, Germany and the Otto-man Empire—and the 1917 Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia. Mean-while, existing victorious Allies such as France, Belgium, Italy, Greece and Romania gained territories, where-as new states were created out of the collapse of Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman and Russian Empires.

To prevent the outbreak of a future world war, the League of Nations was formally created during the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. The organisation’s primary goal was to prevent armed conflict through collective security, military and naval disarmament, and settling international disputes through peaceful negotiations and arbitration.

Despite strong pacifist sentiment af-ter World War I,[18] its aftermath still caused irredentist and revanchist na-tionalism to become important in sev-eral European states. Irredentism and revanchism were strong in Germany because of the significant territorial, colonial, and financial losses incurred by the Treaty of Versailles. Under the treaty, Germany lost around 13 per-cent of its home territory and all of its overseas colonies, while German annexation of other states was pro-hibited, reparations were imposed, and limits were placed on the size and capability of the country’s armed forc-es.[19] Meanwhile, the Russian Civil War had led to the creation of the So-viet Union.[20]

The German Empire was dissolved in the German Revolution of 1918–

A Fading Haven

France is in the midst of transition, from a well-to-do modern economy that has featured extensive govern-ment ownership and intervention to one that relies more on market mech-anisms. The government has partially or fully privatized many large com-panies, banks, and insurers. It retains controlling stakes in several leading firms, including Air France, France Telecom, Renault, and Thales, and is dominant in some sectors, particular-ly power, public transport, and defense industries. The telecommunications sector is gradually being opened to competition. France’s leaders remain

committed to a capitalism in which they maintain social equity by means of laws, tax policies, and social spend-ing that reduce income disparity and the impact of free markets on public health and welfare. The government has lowered income taxes and intro-duced measures to boost employment and reform the pension system. In ad-dition, it is focusing on the problems of the high cost of labor and labor market inflexibility resulting from the 35-hour workweek and restrictions on lay-offs. The tax burden remains one of the highest in Europe

Nature Takes All

For wildlife enthusiasts, parts of France are an open book waiting to be explored. Thanks in part to the French Revolution and in part to the much decried European Common Agri-cultural Policy, much of the French countryside remained fairly back-ward in terms of agricultural progress during the twentieth century, a land farmed in traditional ways by small-holders practising diversity. It maybe left much of French agriculture less productive than the big agribusiness concerns of North America or even Britain, but it also left many parts of France’s rural environment intact, and

its wildlife diverse. While some species inevitably died out in the wild, such as bears and wolves, others such as wild boar, chamoix, martens and red squirrels, peregrine falcons and hen harrie, have survived and are hencefortprotected - though not threaten species. In areas that have bee spared the ravages of indu-strial-scale agriculture, insect life and plant life remain rich and abundantant. And while it is true

The Perfect Design

Agriculture is the cultivation of an-imals, plants, fungi, and other life forms for food, fiber, biofuel, medic-inals and other products used to sus-tain and enhance human life.[1] Ag-riculture was the key development in the rise of sedentary human civiliza-tion, whereby farming of domesticat-ed species created food surpluses that nurtured the development of civiliza-tion. The study of agriculture is known as agricultural science. The history of agriculture dates back thousands of years, and its development has been driven and defined by greatly different climates, cultures, and technologies. However, all farming generally relies on techniques to expand and maintain

the lands that are suitable for raising domesticated species. For plants, this usually requires some form of irriga-tion, although there are methods of dryland farming. Livestock are raised in a combination of grassland-based and landless systems, in an industry that covers almost one-third of the world’s ice- and water-free area. In the developed world, industrial agricul-ture based on large-scale monoculture has become the dominant system of modern farming, although there is growing support for sustainable agri-culture, including permaculture and organic agriculture.

Until the Industrial Revolution, the

vast majority of the human population labored in agriculture. Pre-industrial agriculture was typically subsistence agriculture/self-sufficiency in which farmers raised most of their crops for their own consumption instead of cash crops for trade. A remarka-ble shift in agricultural practices has occurred over the past century in re-sponse to new technologies, and the development of world markets. This also has led to technological improve-ments in agricultural techniques, such as the Haber-Bosch method for syn-thesizing ammonium nitrate which made the traditional practice of recy-cling nutrients with crop rotation and animal manure less important.