Are you looking for garden ideas for a difficult part of your garden?
17.01.2024 - 02:49 / backyardgardener.com / Frederick Leeth
Nature reflects the color of the spirit. Beauty is not confined to a season nor to region. The gardens of Georgia or Florida are perpetually in bloom, but are they more beautiful than northern gardens in winter, where imagination sorts the beautiful tracery of tree branches into designs that few artists have approached in their delineation of nature? Are the Alps grander than the Rockies? Who can judge?
Reading about gardens is the next best thing to working in them. Tulips now bloom in the Holland of our books; the perennial borders are what we hoped they would be all summer; the gardens of the seed catalogs anticipate all sorts of new flowers that are larger, more fragrant, and with colors of superior brilliance. Let us work to make our winter visions come true next year, reading, seeing and planning.
WATERING plants in winter is a rather exacting operation. Those growing actively should have the most water, whereas those which are resting can get along with very little.
Humidity. Plants like a high relative humidity, and there are many ways to attain it. The home gardener who aspires to good house plants should have some sort of humidifier installed.
Glazed Pots. Massachusetts State College, has found that the ordinary clay flower pot absorbs a great share of the moisture which we give to our plants, so that the soil in the pot is quite dry at the bottom, the very place where the feeding roots should be located.
He tells us that the old notion that the plants get air through the pores of the pot is erroneous. His experiments show that plants grow much better when grown in glazed pots, pots that are given a thick coating of paint, or paper pots that have been treated with some substance. The usual paper pot decays readily
Are you looking for garden ideas for a difficult part of your garden?
African violet is perhaps the only full-blown paradox that can survive on a windowsill. On one hand, it is a celebrated show plant, with new cultivars eagerly sought after by collectors and enthusiasts. It has its own organization, the African Violet Society of America, and its own magazine, African Violet. A quick Internet search reveals that there are almost as many African violet sites as there are pages for sex and dieting. And yet, these plants are mass-produced by the hundreds of thousands and are readily available for a minuscule price from mom and pop garden centers, enormous mega-merchandisers, and a host of medium-size vendors.
Possibly from the Latin barba, a beard, many species have a hairy or downy look (Scrophulariaceae). Mullein. A genus of 300 species of hardy herbaceous plants, mostly biennials or short-lived perennials, from temperate parts of Europe and Asia.
Named for Karl August von Bergen, 1704-60, German botanist (Saxifragaceae). These hardy perennial herbaceous plants with large evergreen leaves were at one time called megasea, and were at another time included with the saxifrages. The flowers which come in early spring are showy in white, pink or red-purple, borne in large heads on long stems. The large leathery, glossy leaves are also decorative, especially as in some kinds the foliage is suffused with reddish color in winter.
As the new year begins, our gardens present an inviting canvas for renewal and growth. January is a pivotal month for gardeners, serving as the cornerstone for a flourishing spring.
From the Greek pyr, fire, probably with reference to fever, since the plant was used medicinally to assuage fever (Compositae). These hardy plants are admirable for a sunny border and last well as cut flowers. Long known as pyrethrum they are botanically classified under Chrysanthemum.
The students have returned to school, your mailbox is crammed with a new crop of seed catalogs, the leaves are falling, and the days are getting shorter. Drive by your local garden center or roadside stand and the displays are filled with ornamental kales and cabbages. Autumn has arrived.
Kathy Sandel has shared her gardens with us before (More of Kathy’s Calabasas Garden, Kathy’s Garden Transformation in Sacramento), but today she’s sharing the garden she created for her daughter in Sacramento, California.
From the Greek helios, the sun, and anthemon. a flower (Cistaceae). Sun Rose. A genus of evergreen and semi-evergreen shrubs, sub-shrubs, perennial plants and annuals, very free flowering. Numerous named varieties and hybrids are grown and four species are native plants.
After Helen of Troy ; according to legend the flowers sprang from her tears (Compositae). Sneezeweed. Hardy herbaceous perennials from North America, good for cutting and popularly grown for their late summer flowers. The disc of the flower head is very prominent, a characteristic of the entire genus.
I have given up indoor seed starting completely on several occasions. The first time it happened I was a novice gardener. I had ordered seeds of just about every plant that I saw in the garden catalogs without thinking about such practical things as gallons of potting soil, hours of daily watering, and square feet of windowsill space. It also did not occur to me to determine whether or not I had room in my garden for even a fraction of my seedlings. My chaotic efforts eventually produced some wonderful plants, but the process was so exhausting that I said: “Never again.”
Tender climbing perennial plants which are free flowering and suitable for growing in pots in the greenhouse, or for planting out of doors. They are closely related to the Snapdragon (Antirrhinum), to whose family, Scrophulariaceae, they belong.