Celebrate the beauty of May Birth Month Flowers with their vibrant and enchanting meanings. Discover the blossoms that represent this special month and the significance they hold.
24.07.2023 - 12:06 / hgic.clemson.edu
While most deciduous trees are bare and seem lifeless, red maple (Acer rubrum) illuminates the gray January landscape. Glimmering hazy red to yellow-orange flowers appear to float amid the bare and twiggy branches. Upon closer inspection, their flowers are truly exquisite and a remarkable sight to behold.
Red maple trees are dioecious, meaning male or female flowers occur on separate trees. Still, it is not uncommon for both male and female flowers to appear on the same tree, known as polygamodioecious.
The male flowers appear a light yellow-orange due to their long, protruding stamens, loaded with pollen and encouraging pollinators to visit for a snack. In comparison, female flowers are darker, a subdued red hue with sticky, fuzzy stigmas extending past the petals prepared to catch pollen floating by. While maple tree flowers are primarily wind-pollinated, pollinators buzzing around in January, when not much else is flowering, gladly take advantage of this rare treat.
As the flowers fade, fruit, often showier than the flowers, appear. The fruit, botanically classified as a schizocarp, is split into two-winged structures called samaras. The samaras dangle on the ends of branches by thin pedicels (stalks). They remain on the tree for about a month after the spring foliage emerges until the wind eventually disperses them. When masses of fruit clusters are present, it appears as though trees are still in bloom due to their bright, showy red color. On clear winter days, a hazy red vignette of the tree’s canopy against a blue sky backdrop is quite striking to behold.
For more information on maple trees, see HGIC 1016, Maple.
Celebrate the beauty of May Birth Month Flowers with their vibrant and enchanting meanings. Discover the blossoms that represent this special month and the significance they hold.
Ornamental Japanese Maples are widely available for planting in your garden. The autumn colouring makes these trees spectacular when planted en mass in a woodland or Japanese garden setting.
This selection of top ten Roses to grow as cut flowers has been chosen for their scent and the length of the vase life. If Roses are picked as the buds are breaking they will last at least a week and if they are picked fully open it will be several days.
Japanese maple or Acer palmatum are popular trees and small shrubs. They are grown for an attractive habit and dramatic foliage.
Read Japanese Maple root and branch review
In springtime, the deciduous woodlands around us are beginning to awaken as the delicate flowers of spring ephemerals pierce the blanket of leaf litter. Most of these woodland plants are found in areas with rich, humusy soil and layer of deep leaf litter; they flower when the leaves are off the trees and light reaches the forest floor in spring. These diminutive plants are beautiful, but beyond this, they provide critical support for newly emerging spring bees. As temperatures warm, native solitary bees visit bloodroot, trout lily, spring beauty, Virginia bluebells, and other spring flowers to collect pollen or sip nectar. Some of these bees have a close or exclusive relationship with specific flowers, a fact recognized in their names: trout lily bee (Andrena erythronii) or the spring beauty bee(Andrena erigeniae). Trout lily bees visit more than just trout lily, but the latter relies exclusively on the pink pollen provided by spring beauty to provision their nests. However, many other bees visit this spring beauty too. In fact, 58 species of bees have been reported as visitors to this tiny pink flower. Similarly, bloodroot, trout lilies, and Virginia bluebells are visited by a diversity of bees, including bumblebees (Bombus spp.), little carpenter bees (Ceratina spp.), halictid bees (Halictus spp., Lasioglossum spp.), and mason bees (Osmia spp.). Clearly, these spring ephemerals are of considerable importance to the survival of many spring bee species, a fact we rarely consider when we admire their flowers.
When we purchased our farm in 1977, one of the first plants my husband gave me was a small 1-gallon, knee-high, Japanese maple (Acer palmatum) that was about as big around as a pencil. This little tree was the first Japanese maple planted at Crooked Trail Farm and set in motion my passion for these beautiful trees.
Spring wildflowers are garden stars in the wooded area of South Carolina Botanical Garden’s Natural Heritage Trail from February to May. The spring herbaceous layer is exceptionally diverse in environments with rich soils containing lots of organic material. Every day something new appears in the landscape!
On Saturday, June 8, join me and Adam Wheeler of Broken Arrow Nursery in my garden for tours and a giant plant sale, and select from among an entire day of plant-themed offerings celebrating both herbs and flowers in nearby Hillsdale: herb cooking and flower arranging and growing.Plus, learn to be a better birder in a morning talk and guided walk/workshop, with Kathryn Schneider, past president of the NY State Ornithological Association and author of “Birding the Hudson Valley.” Don
Once they have dropped their leaves and gone dormant, after a good hard freeze or so, I get out the hand cart and engage a brave friend. We say our prayers, then wheel them one by one over my hilly garden, down to the unheated barn.I will certainly meet my end someday under one of these big pots, when I am manning the downhill side of this hauling operation.I make sure that they are well-watered during the fall, so that they go into storage well-hydrated—and therefore less prone to dessication while in there. No water is offered in the coldest months, when the soil and the trees inside the building are mostly frozen, but I start checking around February, once the
A NY FLOWER WOULD BE HARD-PRESSED TO COMPETE with the two most colorful ferns in the garden here, which have been showing off since the first crozier poked through the soil surface in early May and won’t stop till very late fall. No wonder I grow so many Japanese painted ferns and autumn ferns; they make shade gardening look easy, adding heavy doses of purple and silver or coral and gold, respectively, and never asking for so much as a deadheading in return.Japanese painted fern (Athyrium niponicum ‘Pictum’, Zones 5-8) is well-known to most gardeners the last decade, a showy thing with varying proportions and intensities of silvery-gray and purple coloration on its parts.
Adam and I talked about not just the Japanese types, but also other garden-sized maples for adding interest in every season and garden situation–in pots or the high shade of woodland gardens, to full-sun locations.my maple q&a with adam wheelerQ. When I was at Broken Arrow recently, there were many choice things to look at—but I kept noticing the maples you offer, particularly. How many do you grow?A. In the collection at the nursery, I suspect we have 150 or 200 different maples, and really that’s the tip of the iceberg with this genus.Q. There are a lot of native A