Today my heart beat for Russia but my brain told me that Sweden will go through. So a small consolation for me today - as Russia won easily and only made one major fault, they should have shot much more goals than a mere two. So it will be Russia against the Netherlands which should be the highlight of the quarter finals - a shame that one team will lose, and in this case inevitably this should be Russia as the turtle still is on the Dutch's side.
The second match, Spain against Greece, was of no consequence to the group's results; Spain won (with almost none of their stars playing), but the real surprise was that they didn't win by much, and that Greece even scored a goal: so no points for the title holder, but at least one goal shot.
This tree here now has nothing to do whatsoever with football, I just wondered what it's called - didn't find anything anywhere. I don't know this species from my old home country, the Mühlviertel: it doesn't grow there at all while you find it everywhere in the immediate surroundings of Vienna.
I've now done some research on this tree: it is black locust (German Robinie - Robinia pseudoacacia) and it is not an indigenous tree; it came to Europe from America as a park tree and already is growing wild. They are very robust trees, growing on poor soil which becomes better soil by their growth as they have rhizobia in their roots which convert nitrogen from the air into nitrogen usable for plants. Therefore black locusts were able to and quickly began to spread on poor soil where many rare plants are growing - as for example many of the European orchids. Black locusts also grow in Lobau national park, and are a danger for the poor soil growth there - they leave the soil changed forever as they enrich it with nitrogen. Now at last I understand one thing the national park rangers do where black locusts grow: they cut of a ring of bark from their stem which is the most effective way of fighting their rapid growth; just cutting the tree wouldn't help much as the roots would grow again in this case - with 'ringing' however they don't. Now that I know what these 'rings' are all about I'll show them some time soon here on this blog.
