If you ever looked around your home and wondered what you can do to improve your design, look no further. The space might not be begging for an extensive renovation or a major furniture overhaul—it can simply come down to styling.
12.06.2024 - 13:57 / balconygardenweb.com / Ralph Astley
From crocus to clematis, each flower on this list manifests as a masterpiece by Mama Nature! Appearing in surreal pastels and extraordinary form, our pick of Flowers that Look Like Sketches is all the inspiration you need to awaken the Picasso in you!
Botanical Name: Anemone
Straight out of an art gallery, Anemones produce either single or double blooms with delicate petals that have fine ridges. Emerging from tubers, they come in shades of pastel pink, purple, blue, and white and have a dark center, providing contrast within a single bloom.
They need full sun for 6 hours daily and thrive in loamy, acidic, well-draining soil.
Botanical Name: Platycodon grandiflorus
Native to China, the Balloon Flower may get its name from its unique inflated ball-like structure of unopened flower buds, but that’s not all! These blooms open up into a fan shape with pointed petals in many colors and tiny bright centers. Our favorites are varieties in white with variegations that make them look like a part of a sketchbook.
To prolong its blooming season, deadhead the spent flowers. Avoid dividing or transplanting as it has a fragile root system.
Botanical Name: Clematis
Also known as the Virgin’s bower, clematis is a woody vine growing up to 18 feet long. Its exciting blooms are often multi-layered, with up to 20 petals each. But for this list, we select the variety clematis “Tie-dye,” the marbled steaks of white on purple make it look like a sketch artist designed the flower.
Clematis is toxic to humans if ingested and has fragile trailing stems that can snap with the slightest pressure.
Botanical Name: Dianthus
Carnation blooms naturally occur with ruffled, frilly petals in soft and deep shades of cream and pink with darker edges. Divided into five
If you ever looked around your home and wondered what you can do to improve your design, look no further. The space might not be begging for an extensive renovation or a major furniture overhaul—it can simply come down to styling.
In Hannah Muller’s debut book, Designing With Dried Flowers ($22.31; Penguin Random House), she shares expert advice straight from the fields on how to create beautiful, everlasting works of art for any season and occasion. It’s packed with gorgeous photography, handfuls of tips, flower growing and harvesting suggestions, plus inspiring dried flower crafts that go well beyond vase arrangements.
Say you’re done making your favorite recipe, and run to your herb garden for some home-grown seasoning. But all you find are leggy shadows of a once-robust plant! Well, you can avoid this picture if you gently top your herb when it’s young with sets of true leaves and even after.
Image: Hampton Court Flower Festival. Credit: RHS
Want your backyard to be a personalized fruit market? Then, prune your favorite established fruit plant, gather its cuttings, and start multiplying.
This year Chelsea Flower Show was full of interesting trees and shrubs with lots of dreamy woodland-edge planting in dappled light underneath leafy canopies. Native trees such as hawthorns, hazels and silver birch were the favoured choices in many of the show gardens, with a mixture of native and non-native ornamental plants selected for resilience and sustainability. In Ula Maria’s Forest Bathing Garden, white foxgloves, cow parsley and other umbellifers like Baltic parsley (Cenolophium denudatum) and valerian (Valeriana officinalis) were mixed with the simple shade-loving grass Melica altissima ‘Alba’ while Tom Stuart-Smith showcased intricate tapestries of interesting foliage in different shapes and textures. In other gardens, orange was a popular colour in many shades, from deep rusty orange irises to pale orange geums, especially in Ann Marie-Powell’s exuberant Octavia Hill Garden. As always, the Grand Pavilion is the ideal place to discover new and interesting plants showcased by some of the country’s leading nurseries.
The beauty of the brightly-hued daisy-like cosmos flower is undisputed, but is there something more to it? What sets this blossom apart in the far-reaching world of blooms? Read on to find out the meaning of the Cosmos flower and why everyone should grow it!
Welcome to an exploration of flowers that start with the letter “B”. From the stunning Begonia to the vibrant Bluebell, this list covers a wide range of flowers, each with its own unique charm.
Smitten by the lacy fronds of ferns and the clever runoff of vines? Our selection of vines with bright green, fern-like foliage offer graceful alternatives to the ferns and come with their own set of unique perks! Read on to find out.
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You walk through the produce section of your supermarket and everything looks so familiar. But the fruits and vegetables you see bear no resemblance to their ancestors from thousands of years ago. Most of them don't taste the same either.
Peter Piper may have picked a peck of “perfect” peppers, but for the rest of us, a good harvest of this popular veggie can be more elusive. Peppers, like their tomato cousins, can be a disease-prone, temperature-sensitive, weak-rooted crop. Success, however, can be easy to achieve if you pick the right variety. Like tomatoes, peppers come in a wide range of colors, textures, and sizes. They also can be spicy or sweet in flavor. But aside from appearance and flavor, varieties also vary in their proclivity to resist disease and drought. All of these factors will help determine which type you choose to buy.