"Gardens of Jatuli" (🇫🇮jatulintarhat) are ancient spiral paths or a labyrinths outlined with stones. We have around 200 of them in Finland - and nobody really knows why. Maybe they were built to ward off evil, maybe for fertily rituals.
Or maybe their name is the key to unlock the mystery. According to an old legend, Jatulis were giants who inhabited Finland before the indigenous Sámi people arrived. Jatulis fled further and further to the north, until they disappeared. Or did they? Some say they are just sleeping, tree roots climbing over their bellies, mosses and lichens covering their features...
Fun fact: Slime molds don't have brains or nervous systems, but somehow they still manage to remember, anticipate changes and make surprisingly complex decisions, like solving mazes. How they do all this is still a bit of a mystery. 👾
Some slime molds are super tiny, so I'm always pretty excited when I find them in the woods. Like this Cribraria argillacea (or savihäkkinen, "little clay cage dude", in Finnish). Swipe right to see just how tiny it is... 😊
Happy mid-winter! And happy ”Heikki’s day.” 😊 Here in Finland people used to believe that this is the day when the “back of the winter” breaks – and apparently it does it with a loud bang, so people would bang on stuff, too, to celebrate. This was thought to be the coldest time of the year, and from now on the weather would get milder.
This winter has been exceptionally warm here, so I thought I’d post something I found last summer that looks a bit like snow. This little creature is a slime mold, an amoeba that can crawl on the ground. Her genus is officially called Ceratiomyxa, but I prefer the Finnish name Nukkanen, “small tuft.” Cute, isn’t it? ❤️ #SlimeMoldSunday
Christmas is over, but elves haven't stopped peeking through our windows, at least not here in Finland. 🇫🇮 In Nordic folklore tonttu (or "tomte" in Swedish 🇸🇪 and "nisse" in Danish 🇩🇰 and Norwegian 🇳🇴) is a small guardian of houses, barns and saunas. If treated well, tonttus protect the family and animals from all kinds of misfortune - but they are known to have a very short temper, especially when offended. My grandmom used to teach us kids not to argue in the sauna, so that we wouldn't anger the saunatonttu. 😉 (This is a "studio shot" of my mushroom tonttu, see the previous post to see the finished artwork. 😊)
