Back in 2009 Grand Rapids photographer Brooke Pennington shot this incredible photo of a cat and a praying mantis.

via Colossal

photo by Brooke Pennington

This short video shows the process of transplanting a tree using an ingenious truck-mounted tree spade. The transplantation was performed near Melbourne, Australia by Arbor Co. The video is by VicRoads, an Australian transport authority.

via Doobybrain.com

Yosemite Range of Light, is a beautiful time-lapse video of Yosemite National Park created by Shawn Reeder.

via PetaPixel & The Atlantic

To celebrate Earth Day 2012, this all-natural experimental music video titled Music from Nature was created by Burt’s Bees in collaboration with composer Diego Stucco.

All the sounds you hear in this piece were created real-time using instruments provided by Mother Nature herself. The same ingredients that are instrumental in making the Burt’s Bees products you love to love. So take two minutes out of your day to pause, reflect, and probably even shimmy. Because Earth Day just got a whole lot groovy-er.

via Viral Viral Videos and CBS News

Former Canadian software developer and current carpenter Joel Allen built a beautiful egg-shaped tree house, The HemLoft, in the woods near Whistler, British Columbia. The exact location of the house is a secret because Allen built it on Crown lands (roughly: government property) without permission.

via The Hairpin

photos by Heidi and Joel Allen

“Clay Nest” by German artist Nils Udo was a giant outdoor sculpture in which logs and bamboo were fashioned into an 80 ton nest. The sculpture was installed in 2005 at Clemson University in South Carolina and was dismantled for safety reasons in 2007. For more photos of the sculpture see this Flickr photo set by Dylan Wolfe.

via Colossal

photos by Dylan Wolfe

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Last August, Google sent a team to Brazil to create Street View maps of some of the waterways, forests, and villages of the Amazon Basin (video).

San Francisco Bay Area artist Andres Amador creates gorgeous large scale beach paintings, primarily on beaches on the coast of California. NY Daily News has posted a gallery of his works.

via NY Daily News & Blogging via Typewriter

Last Fall, French artist Gaëlle Villedary installed a nearly 1400 foot long grass carpet through the town of Jaujac, France for an installation entitled “Tapis Rouge!” (“Red Carpet”). The installation marked the 10th anniversary of the town’s Art and Nature trail. To see the entirety of “Tapis Rouge!”, see this fast motion walkthrough:

via Designboom & Hypenotice & Landezine

photos by David Monjou

British artist Tommy Craggs recycles the trunks of downed trees by carving elaborate sculptures into them using a chainsaw. He recently caused a stir in Knaresborough, a rural town in England, by anonymously carving a series of sculptures in trees around town.

via Treehugger, Juxtapoz, & The Daily Mail

photos via Ross Parry Agency

Artist Sonja Hinrichsen and 5 volunteers created this massive snow drawing piece in Rabbit Ears Pass, Colorado, on January 29 (video by Cedar Beauregard).

via Colossal

photos 1 and 2 by Cedar Beauregard, photo 3 by Sonja Hinrichsen

British artist Claire Brewster creates beautiful paper cut art out of old maps. She focuses on the natural world—mainly birds and plants.

via Colossal & Job’s Wife

“Years” is a modified record player that analyzes the growth rings on a cross section of a tree and translates the information into ghostly piano music (video). The device was created by German artist Bartholomäus Traubeck.

A tree’s year rings are analysed for their strength, thickness and rate of growth. This data serves as basis for a generative process that outputs piano music based on the year ring data. Those are analyzed for their thickness and growth rate and are then mapped to a scale which is again defined by the overall appeareance of the wood (ranging from dark to light and from strong texture to light texture). The foundation for the music is certainly found in the defined ruleset of programming and hardware setup, but the data acquired from every tree interprets this ruleset very differently.

via Nerdcore & Creative Applications Network

Sheldon Neill and Colin Delehanty created a beautiful time-lapse video of Yosemite National Park as part of their Project Yosemite. The video is set to the song Outro by M83 from their new album Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming.

via Bad Astronomy

In this clip from BBC One’s Earthflight, devil rays in the Sea of Cortez in Mexico leap out of water and perform impressive aerial acrobatics.

via Reddit

It won’t surprise you that we at Laughing Squid like animals with tentacles. Usually that means cephalopods, of course. But the peculiar case of the Star-nosed Mole deserves a mention for its exceptional tentactular protuberances.

The mole’s most distinctive feature is a circle of 22 mobile, pink, fleshy tentacles at the end of the snout, from which they derive their name. These are used to identify food by touch, such as worms, insects and crustaceans.

This 2008 video by Animal Planet gives an extreme closeup of the mole’s eponymous feature. The handy schnoz is more useful than you might think. Its 11-fingered nose-hands provide the mole incredible detail of what’s right… under its nose.

The picNYC table from Haiko Cornelissen Architecten is an indoor aluminum dining table created for urban living spaces that actually grows grass. Owners of this table must hand-cut the tabletop grass to maintain it because “no table grass mower yet exists”. While designed as a concept piece, interested buyers may contact Haiko Cornelissen for more information on purchasing one.

The picNYC table creates a surreal experience of nature in the city that literally transforms dining. Suddenly spilling water becomes a necessity instead of a problem, wine glasses need coasters not to prevent ring stains but to avoid tumbling…

Based on the concept of transposing natural experiences to the apartment, endless alterations are possible with flowers, herbs or even vegetables. Depending on the needs and green thumbs of the owner, the PicNYC table brings various degrees and qualities of the rural experience into the urban residence. As a consequence, the PicNYC table transforms dining into a feast at a new intersection of nature and city.

via Gizmodo and Architizer

photos by Iwan Baan and Alan Tansey

Since 2004, Welsh artist Zander Olsen has been creating beautiful wrapped tree installations in the rural UK for his photo series “Tree, Line.”

This is an ongoing series of constructed photographs rooted in the forest. These works, carried out in Surrey, Hampshire and Wales,involve site specific interventions in the landscape, ‘wrapping’ trees with white material to construct a visual relationship between tree, not-tree and the line of horizon according to the camera’s viewpoint.

via BOOOOOOOM!

TimeScapes, directed by Tom Lowe, is a stunning time-lapse documentary about the scenic beauty of the American Southwest (trailer). The film was shot on Red Epic and Canon still cameras at 4K resolution. TimeScapes is scheduled for release in May, 2012 and can be pre-ordered.

via Discover Magazine

photos via Tom Lowe

Ukrainian photographer Oleg Gordienko captured this beautiful photo series of a heavily forested stretch of train track in Ukraine known as “The Tunnel of Love.”

via Damn Cool Pictures & Gadget Magazine

Dutch jewelry maker Miranda van Dijk of Puur Anders makes Hidden Memories, a collection of leaf-shaped fabric jewelry customized with vintage photographs. There are more designs featured on her site.

My collection Hidden Memories is inspired by the connection between nature and humankind. I print old photographs on cotton or linen fabric and turn them into leaves or flowers. Everything is handmade by me. I’m always working on new pieces and do not work with seasonal collections. All items are one of a kind or in a limited edition.

via Craft

“Over The River” is an upcoming art installation by Christo in which he plans to cover 5.9 miles of a 42 mile stretch of the Arkansas River in Colorado with fabric. The $50 million project was given the go-ahead by Federal regulators on Monday (it is awaiting final approval by local authorities). Pending approval, the project is scheduled for display for two weeks in August, 2014.

Over The River is a two-week temporary work of art by the artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude. The project’s plans call for 5.9 miles of silvery, luminous fabric panels to be suspended high above the Arkansas River along a 42-mile stretch of the river between Salida and Cañon City in south-central Colorado. Fabric panels will be suspended at eight distinct areas of the river that were selected by the artists for their aesthetic merits and technical viability.

For more, see Christo discussing his vision for the project and talking with locals about how he came up with the concept.

via The New York Times

images 1 and 3 by Christo and Wolfgang Volz, photo 2 by Wolfgang Volz

Google Maps with Street View has gone off-road to show city parks across the world including The High Line in New York City, a beautiful elevated park in Manhattan’s West Side created out of a reclaimed railway line.

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via Google Blog & The High Line

Ricardo Mohr shot an incredible photo of lightning on top of the ash cloud rising out of the Puyehue-Cordón Caulle volcano in Chile.

via National Geographic & Boing Boing

Baumraum is a German treehouse design firm that makes beautiful custom treehouses. The treehouses range in price from about $25,000 to nearly $200,000, are tree-friendly, and constructed from sustainable materials. They’ve even made a number of treehouse hotels.

Baumraum architect Andreas Wenning has published a book on treehouse construction, Treehouses – Construction and Design Manual.

A treehouse! A promise of adventure for the kids, a retreat for the adults, a romantic hideaway close to nature. These special little dwellings installed up among the trees fire our imagination and rouse our curiosity, bringing back childhood memories, and with them the desire to climb up and enter a magic world amongst the foliage. To be spellbound again, to witness the different sights and sounds up there by day and night and throughout the seasons. To play up there, to work undisturbed, to relax, to daydream…

via Juxtapoz