Flower, Flower online, Flower send and more.

Find the most beautifully arranged flowers for delivery on 2Flowers.com

2011-12-20T02:15:00.001-08:00

2Flowers.com delivers flowers to anywhere in the world within a period of 24 hours. There are a variety of flower arrangements done for buyers to choose from. They are an international flower delivery service.

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Bouquets Inter Flora Shop Dublin For Fresh Flowers At Your Doorstep

2011-11-29T08:23:00.001-08:00

Whether it is a wedding ceremony or a birthday party, the best presents you can pick on every occasion are the flowers. Flowers with their elegance and charm make the prefect gifts always. If there is something that might comfort your depression, these are the flowers again. Flowers have amazing healing power that can heal any pain softly. Hence, the flowers with all their varieties have become popular gifts all over the world. When it comes to presenting a bouquet of flowers to your distant beloved, the flowers online Dublin can help you much. These flower shops are active internationally and are best options for sending flowers to friends and relatives abroad.

People have admired the grace and glamour of the flowers ever since they have discovered the nature's beauty. A flower is most probably the purest instance of nature's creation. Beauty of a flower even melts the heart of a beast. Hardly any place on earth except the arctic regions that does not give birth to flowers. As the flowers are the purest form of manifestation, people prefer to relate their feelings and emotions through these boons of nature. Among those lands that have admired the beauty of flowers overwhelmingly since ages, Dublin is a prime one. People of Dublin are very much fond of flowers. Due to this reason, florists Dublin is more popular than other countries. Dublin people like to adore flowers in almost all occasions of their lives.

A sweet fragrance of flowers opens your eyes in the morning. Imagine the divine sight where a meek strip of sunray is touching the lilies on the table pot, and the flowers are waving in the cool breeze of the morning! Who would not love to begin his/her day with such an eye-feasting sight? How about the idea if you can give your girlfriend such a surprise? You should not worry if she lives far off. You can seek help from any of the flowers online Dublinfor sending the flowers to your beloved in any corner of the planet. These inter flora shops are great boons for the flower lovers all around the world. They can get you any seasonal, tropical, or climatic flower you seek.

Almost all of us are fond of flowers, but a few of us know how to decorate the flowers properly. Floral decorations, if done properly always look stunning. All other decorations appear being pale in front of the nicely decorated flowers. The florists Dublin may also provide you with some basic ideas how to embellish an occasion delightfully with the flowers only. In fact, seeking help from the flower suppliers is always a better idea, as they can provide you with a wide range of colorful flowers suitable for various occasions. These days, the flower wholesalers often offer services for decorating the wedding milieu also. You can avail some of the best flowers online Dublin. Many of these wholesalers are also skilled flower decorators who can arrange the flowers beautifully on any of the occasions.

Flora Expo to highlight Taiwan's 'flower power'

2010-11-04T06:46:00.000-07:00

Taipei, Nov. 4 (CNA) Standing in front of a sea of crimson red petunias with her husband, Chang Chien-hua nods and smiles approvingly.

"I've been walking around the park for almost three hours, and I still don't want to go home, " said the 73-year-old grandmother, who was one of the special guests invited to tour the Taipei International Flora Exposition on the first day of its trial run in early October.

The longtime Taipei City resident said she has loved flowers all her life because they "always put me in a good mood."

"How can anyone get angry when they are surrounded by these beautiful flowers? This is exactly the kind of thing that Taiwan needs right now," she added.

Whether Chang is proved right cannot be known just days before the Flora Expo 2010 officially opens on Saturday. But the Taipei City government hopes the event will not only add much needed hues to the capital city's environment but also solidify Taiwan's place as the world's "Flower Kingdom."

Taiwan was selected by the International Association of Horticultural Producers (AIPH) in 2006 to host the prestigious event, the first internationally recognized exposition ever to be held in Taiwan.

The Taipei City government has been working double time to ensure that the six-month festival that runs from Nov. 6 to April 25 has enough substance to hold the interest of visitors, quell critics, and amaze the world with Taiwan's "flower power."

The 91.8-hectare expo site in the northern part of the capital city is spread out over four park areas -- Yuanshan, Xinsheng, Fine Arts and Dajia Riverside.

It will be home to 14 pavilions and more than 800 varieties of orchids, 329 million stems of locally developed plant varieties, from impatiens and bamboos to bonsai trees, and award-winning landscape and gardening designs from 22 countries and 26 cities.

"Although Taiwan's flower industry already enjoys international prominence, the expo is a perfect chance for more people to appreciate the wide range of flower species we have in the country, " said expo spokeswoman Ma Chien-hui.

To make the event truly "Taiwanese, " over 90 percent of the flowers and vegetation on display have been procured from flower farms around Taiwan, injecting NT$2.2 billion into the local flower industry.

Besides promoting Taiwan's floriculture prowess, the event also hopes to showcase the country's commitment to green technology and environmental conservation.

The Pavilion of New Fashion located in Yuanshan Park is the world's first house made entirely from reusable waste. A total of 1.5 million recycled PET plastic bottles were used to build the pavilion's EcoARK, and all materials used during the R&D, manufacturing and construction phases of the project were sourced in Taiwan.

During the six-month exposition, only paper products made of dandelions instead of trees will be used on the show grounds. Doing so will save 3,300 trees and 281 tons of carbon emissions, organizers said.

With the city holding a mayoral election on Nov. 27, the expo has been a target of opposition politicians looking to discredit the city government. They have accused expo organizers, for example, of procuring flowers at inflated prices and said the expo's layout would disrupt traffic.

But during the exposition's 20-day trial period, the 450,000 visitors had a 78 percent satisfaction rate, and what they saw, says Taipei City Acting Deputy Mayor Allan Chu, was just a "sneak preview."

"Just wait until the grand opening. It will be like seeing a woman on her wedding day, all perfectly made-up and ready to present her most gorgeous self to the world," he said.

Political mudslinging aside, however, the expo has been the target of criticism from other quarters. Flower industry representatives contend that Taipei City, though well-intentioned, "completely missed the boat" because the expo will do little for flower farmers and the city's development.

One of them is Lin Chun-hung, the director of the Taipei City Landscape and Floriculture Commerce Association, who was part of the group of Taiwanese flower retailers that lobbied the AIPH for the right to host the event.

He commended the hard work of Mayor Hau Lung-bin and his team but called the idea of having Taiwanese plants make up 90 percent of expo's displays a "big mistake."

"An international expo should give flower farmers and vendors of the host country a chance to see flowers from around the world. It is intended to be an opportunity for flower growers from around the world to exchange ideas and techniques," he said.

"Using mostly locally grown flowers defeats the purpose of having an international expo."

Another purpose of a flower expo, he said, should be to help jumpstart the development of an area, which is why previous expos such as the ones held in Thailand, Germany, and Japan were all located on the outskirts of cities rather than in the heart of a city like the upcoming expo in Taipei.

"In the past, once the expo ended, the plants and related architecture usually remained in place as part of the area's basic infrastructure. But our expo is being held in the middle of an already overdeveloped city. We basically wasted a good chance to develop a part of country that needed shaping up," he said.

According to the organizing committee, the original plan was, in fact, to hold the expo in Taipei's less-developed Guandu area to the northwest of the city, but the idea had to be dropped because of disputes with local landowners.

After the expo, none of the pavilions will be destroyed and all but one will remain in their current location. The buidlings will be converted into exhibition halls for government agencies such as the Council of Agriculture and the Ministry of Economic Affairs.

Some other naysayers argue that the expo should not have been held in the autumn and winter, but rather in the spring when the flowers are in full bloom.

Not so, said Lee Tsang-yu, the director of the Taiwan Orchid Growers Association. He said that because of Taiwan's unique geography and seasonal changes, November to April is the best time of the year to see flowers in Taiwan because of its mild winter.

"Japan held its floral expo in April because anytime before that would have been too cold for the flowers and visitors. But Taiwan is just the opposite. If we waited until after April, the summer heat would kill off the plants very quickly," he contended.

As a member of the expo planning committee, Lee said he was hoping that the expo would be as successful as expected because of its importance to Taiwan's national image.

But he acknowledged that the exposition still had many flaws because of the rush to put it together.

"Two years is not enough time to plan and build an exposition of this size, " he said. "What we need to do now is resolve as many problems

Spain uncovers cocaine haul beneath flower shipment

2009-12-28T22:55:00.000-08:00

By Sarah Rainsford
BBC News, Madrid

Spanish police have intercepted a two-tonne shipment of cocaine, smuggled into the country from Colombia.

The drugs, which Spanish media reports say were worth 70m euros (£62.8m), were hidden beneath a consignment of thousands of cut flowers.

They were discovered by police in an operation code-named "Flower Power" at Foronda airport, in the Basque Country.

Spain's interior ministry has released pictures showing how the drugs were packed into the base of wooden pallets.

Police found more than 2,000kg of what they describe as "extremely pure" cocaine which had been flown into northern Spain from Colombia.

The seizure follows a police investigation launched last year.

A total of 13 people have been arrested so far, including airport customs officers and three suspects in Barcelona and Madrid.

It is Spain's second major drugs haul in a week.

Last Tuesday, a ship carrying 1.5 tonnes of cocaine was seized off the coast during an international police operation.

A drug smuggling network - again involving Colombia - is being investigated.

No flower show leaves people wilted

2009-02-22T04:44:00.000-08:00

BOSTON (AP) - It might seem like spring is coming a little later this year.

For the first time in 137 years, the Massachusetts Horticultural Society has canceled its late winter tradition, the New England Spring Flower Show.

The show, held in recent years at the Bayside Expo Center, fell victim to financial problems and management turmoil at the society.

Its executive director, Bob Feige, resigned this summer after it was revealed he spent three days in jail in 2007 for failing to pay workers of a business he owned.

The society then announced it was cutting most of its 30 staff members.

In place of the show, the society and its volunteers are staging scaled-down displays in office and hotel lobbies.

It's a big step down for a show that traditionally offered a burst of color and a little hope after a long New England winter.

History in your garden: Sweet violet (Viola odorata)

2009-02-15T03:06:00.000-08:00

By Monty Don
Last updated at 11:01 PM on 13th February 2009

Roses may be red, but violets are not really blue. More mauveish, really. However, the sweet violet, Viola odorata, is certainly deliciously scented and, in its own, much more delicate way, as lovely as any bunch of roses.
They do not just look good, either. Sweet violets can been eaten raw, distilled into perfumes, and have been used as a laxative and a cure for bronchitis for millennia.

The Romans made a sweet wine from the flowers. They were also an essential component in medieval 'strewing' herbs, scattered over the floor to sweeten the air, which, given the general levels of personal hygiene, must have been pretty rank.

Napoleon had an obsession with the flowers and died wearing a locket of violets from Josephine's grave.

The Victorians had an insatiable demand for them as posies and perfume, and the native V. odorata could not satisfy this. However, in 1874, it was reported that six tons of Parma violet flowers were being harvested in the south of France each year. If you think how small and light each flower is, collecting six tons of them is a staggering concept.

Parma violets are probably Asiatic in origin and, unlike V. odorata, are tender and winter flowering. They reached this country at the start of the 19th century and, by mid-century, were all the rage. At Windsor alone, 3,000 plants were grown each year under frames just to meet the needs of the royal family and their court.

Lotus to charm visitors flocking to Spring Flower Festival 2009

2009-01-25T02:52:00.000-08:00

Lotus, the symbol of purity and enlightenment, will be the highlight of Ho Chi Minh City’s annual spring flower festival at Tao Dan Park 2009 Tet, according to the organization board.

Collections of tens of pink, white and purple lotuses and nenuphars (water lily) will appear everywhere from the two main gates on Truong Dinh and Cach Mang Thang Tam streets to two artificial lakes covering an area of more than 100 square meters.

The lotuses and nenuphars are decorated to rise up into the sky and depict the development of the city and the country in various fields including economy, culture and society.

The festival will use flowers brought from neighboring provinces by the Ho Chi Minh Public Parks and Greenery Company. In addition to Vietnamese lotuses, there will is also have flowers from Thailand.

More than 5,000 items, ornamental plants, bonsai, rock-gardens, dried trees, grafted stones, cacti, ornamental fish and various valuable and rare flowers from throughout the country, are to be displayed.

The festival will also include exhibitions of Vietnamese calligraphy, variety music shows, folk games, and performances of southern folk music, dragon dances and human chess.

There is also a Japanese garden designed by an overseas Vietnamese living in Japan. The garden contains several elements such as mountain, rock, water, plantings and hillside field landscapes. Japanese gardens were developed under the influence of the distinctive and stylized Chinese gardens during the Asuka period (538-710).Today Japanese gardens are not only seen in Japan, but other countries around the world.

The organizers hope that the festival, with the attendance of artisans from Chinese Taipei, will attract a great number of local and international visitors during the Tet holiday.

Bromeliad, Interesting and Beautiful

2009-01-17T23:57:00.000-08:00

By Jos Van Hage
Saturday, January 17, 2009 03:45 AM

A beautiful and interesting looking houseplant for the home is the Bromeliad.

Many have beautiful, colorful foliage while others have beautiful, colorful bracts and flowers while others have both the colorful foliage, and bracts and flowers. All have leaves that grow in a spiral formation which looks like a rosette with the center molded into a cup. It is from this cup that some varieties have flowers and colorful bracts that emerge; it is also where you water the plant, filling the cup shape with water.

Bromeliads originate from the tropics and are epiphytes which mean that they are air plants and grow on rocks and trees and get their nutrients and moisture from particles in the air and through the rain. They can also be planted in a pot in a well drained potting soil which is how they are most often sold and grown in the home. One type of bromeliad that is sold as an air plant is the grey tillandsias and these can be attached to wood, bark etc.

Bromeliads are easy to care for, easy to grow and are not bothered by many pests are disease. Depending on the variety, most prefer a brightly lit area. Watering them is different than watering other plants because you want to keep water in the central cup of the plant if it has one. Every few weeks the cup should be flushed out with fresh water so that the water remains fresh. The soil should be watered well and then allowed to go dry between waters. If the soil is kept too moist it could cause the plant to rot and have a problem with fungus.

Bromeliads which bloom are most often sold when in bloom because they can be difficult to get into bloom. The blooms are very long lasting and can bloom for months. Most bromeliads will only bloom once and then after the flower is done the plant will produce little pups along the base of the plant. After a few months these little pups are removed along with some roots and are transplanted shallowly into a well drained compost, keeping the new plants warm. For them to bloom they need lots of warmth, sun and some skill as they are not easy to get into bloom. Sometimes placing the plant into a plastic bag with a ripe apple for a few days will help because the ethylene gas from the apple could start the plant to produce flower buds.

A well known bromeliad is the Urn Plant which has thick silver leaves and produces a stem from the center of the cup which has large pink bracts and blue flowers that last for months. There are other varieties available and they are certainly well worth growing in the home because of their beauty and long lasting blooms.

Tiny cymbidium orchids bloom well indoors: Ask OSU Extension

2008-12-24T05:38:00.000-08:00

by Michael Loos/Ohio State University Extension
Wednesday December 24, 2008, 8:00 AM

Q: Earlier this month, I was given a cymbidium orchid. How do I take care of it?

A: Many genera of orchids make great indoor houseplants. Cymbidium orchids are among the showiest. A well-grown plant can bloom for eight to 12 weeks indoors. I had one in my college dormitory room that lasted the entire winter quarter.

It is said that many orchids are unusually beautiful in bloom and unusually modest in leaf. Cymbidium are attractive all season. The leaves are long and strap-shaped. Texturally, they are a good foil to other houseplants. In bloom, cymbidium are spectacular. Up to 50 flowers per spike grace plants during their long blooming season.

If purchasing your own plant, look for miniature and ultraminiature, or teacup, cymbidium. These smaller selections are more easily grown in the house. They are more adaptable to the indoor household environment. While their larger cousins require cool temperatures, the smaller selections grow very well in the same conditions we like.

Bright light is imperative. Without it, cymbidium will languish. Keep plants moist, but not sodden. The growing medium should be very well drained. Fir bark, coir chips, and long-fibered sphagnum will allow the plant to be moist but well aerated. Place outside in late May, keep evenly moist and fertilize heavily in summer; reduce fertilization in August to help bud set and allow the plant to remain out of doors well into October. Cool night temperatures will initiate flower production. Bring the plant back indoors, keeping it at about 60 degrees Fahrenheit and in full sun. Your cymbidium should bloom any time between November and April, depending upon its background.

Q: I always wanted to grow bonsai. Where do I start?

A: Start with a good book. There are numerous, excellent books on the subject. The Internet can be a great tool. One thing to remember. There are many rules about bonsai. Learn them well; then learn the most effective ways to break them. Use the rules as guides to the art. There are few specimen trees that precisely follow the rules. They just had good artists assist in the shaping process.

Keep in mind that there are many people who are successful in growing bonsai. They each have something unique to add. People can be great resources, but do what works for you. Don't be afraid of failure. If you meet a bonsai grower who tells you he has never killed a tree, he's not telling you the truth.

After you have done some research, start with a medium-size tree or nursery plant. Tiny trees are difficult to keep alive. Large trees can be cost prohibitive. Most importantly, like everything else, just do it. "Practice makes perfect."

Q: My cat keeps eating the tinsel in my house. Will this harm him?

A: Antique tinsel will kill a pet or human. It can be distinguished by its heavy weight. It is made from lead and will be poisonous if ingested. Modern tinsel is plastic. It will not be toxic but can lead to bowel distress if consumed in quantity.

I would recommend that you remove the tinsel from the portion of the tree the cat can reach. This may be the entire tree or just the lower portion.

Q: My Boston fern seems to have exploded. There are leaves everywhere. What can I do?

A: Quietly dispatch it to the compost pile. Boston ferns are not indoor friendly in most houses. They require a cool, bright, humid and evenly moist growing environment to succeed indoors in winter. I can't grow them indoors either.

Call a master gardener for advice from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Monday and Thursday at 216-429-8235 or e-mail your questions to mgdiagnostics_cuya@ag.osu.edu anytime. Gardening information is also available here and here. Loos is the horticulture educator of the Ohio State University Extension, Cuyahoga County, 9127 Miles Ave., Cleveland OH 44105.

Steppingstones on the path to plant diversity

2008-12-14T01:09:00.000-08:00

by Dulcy Mahar, Special to The Oregonian
Friday December 12, 2008, 3:21 PM

As promised, here's an oversimplified, unscientific "Classic Comics" version of how Northwest gardening, or at least plant selection, has changed during the past three decades. It started with the amazing discovery that there are plants other than rhododendrons.

1. We become Anglophiles: The first toe tip into a diverse plant world was influenced by English gardens with their cottage plants and borders. Petunias and marigolds were out; perennials were in. The Hardy Plant Society began importing English garden aristocrats such as Rosemary Verey and Christopher Lloyd to enchant (or corrupt) us. We were goners under their spell.

Signature plants: Old roses, lilies, lavender, iris, salvia, hardy geraniums, lady's mantle (Alchemilla) and all things soft and romantic.

2. Things look up: Then we began to want something more than a mere "flower garden." Soon we were inserting shrubs and small trees in among the perennials, all the while bemoaning the fact that we hadn't done that first. Taller plants got us to look skyward, and up went trellises and arbors draped with divine vines.

Signature plants: Clematis (an unabated lust); deciduous shrubs; and small ornamental trees such as Styrax, stewartia and the wedding cake dogwood (Cornus controversa 'Variegata').

3. We fall for foliage: Suddenly we were in foliage frenzy. Green was great, but red and gold leaves were hotter. Foliage also provided the new "in" element, texture. And it didn't need deadheading.

Signature plants: Coral flower (Heuchera), smoke bush (Cotinus), gold- and nearly black-leaved elderberries (Sambucus racemosa 'Sutherland Gold' and S. nigra), ninebark (Physocarpus) and ornamental grasses.

4. We get attitude: Was there any other place to go? Oh yes, we wanted what magazines described as "plants with attitude." These plants have strong presence and structure. If English cottage flowers were like cute Yorkies, the attitude plants were more like Afghan hounds.

Signature plants: Euphorbia, New Zealand flax (Phormium), yucca (even I, a former yucca scoffer, am softening), gunnera and that ornamental rhubarb (Rheum palmatum 'Atrosanguineum') that was on the cover of Thomas Hobbs' "Shocking Beauty." Didn't everyone want that?

5. Things heat up: Everyone rushed to name the new trend: tropicalisimo, pushing the envelope, zonal denial. At some point, this morphed from true tropicals, which had to be brought inside in winter, to semi-hardy perennials that might live over without protection and might not. We were willing to take the chance. Someone even declared ours a Mediterranean climate because of mild winters and dry summers. Still, it doesn't look like Capri outside.

Signature plants: Canna, Aeonium, flowering maple (Abutilon), angel's trumpet (Brugmansia), elephant's ear (Colocasia), kangaroo paw (Anigozanthos), Echeveria and the bananas I manage to kill every year.

6. Plant lust takes hold: A byproduct of the lust for new plants was the gravitation toward collections. For example, if you loved the new red-leaved Heuchera cultivars, you had to try all the gold and peach-leaved versions. We pursued new cultivars like the Holy Grail.

Signature plants: Podophyllum, Jack-in-the-pulpit (Arisaema), fairy bells (Disporum), Smilacina, Cardiocrinum giganteum and anything that seems to have been hunted down in exotic corners of the world by our intrepid plant explorer Dan Hinkley.

7. Some go au naturel: Northwest gardeners with shady plots had always noticed our climate and surrounding greenery were hospitable to an Asian garden, but most didn't want to follow the rigid rules applied in true Japanese and Chinese gardens. Instead, they developed gardens that suggested Asian elements but also were comfortably Northwesty, elegant and easy to maintain. We called the look fusion.

Signature plants: Hydrangea, hosta, hardy fuchsia, hellebore, heavenly bamboo (Nandina), conifers, ferns and native ground covers.

Scientists explore nature’s designs: Physical chemist Joanna Aizenberg imitates structures found in nature

2008-12-08T03:58:00.000-08:00

Abstract:
As a graduate student, Harvard physical chemist Joanna Aizenberg acquired a passionate curiosity about — of all things — sponges. She particularly liked the ones made of glass, whose apparent fragility belied the fact that they could withstand terrific pressure in the deep sea.

Sponges are now among the central artifacts in an emerging branch of science Aizenberg is helping to pioneer: biomimetics. That's the study of whatever nature does well — and how that may inspire better tools, materials, and processes.

Scientists explore nature’s designs: Physical chemist Joanna Aizenberg imitates structures found in nature
Cambridge, MA | Posted on December 7th, 2008
Aizenberg is particularly interested in how living organisms form robust and elegant inorganic structures. The glass fibers framing those deep-sea sponges, for instance, are stronger and more optically efficient than anything humankind can yet make.

She outlined the nature of her work in an abundantly illustrated lecture Nov. 19 at the Radcliffe Gymnasium, "Connecting Engineering, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Architecture Through Biomimetics."

Aizenberg — a trained mathematician and chemist who earned a doctorate in the biology of materials — has the chops to connect all those disciplines. She is the Gordon McKay Professor of Materials Science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Susan S. and Kenneth L. Wallach Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, where she is a fellow this year.

To illustrate the kind of work done at her SEAS laboratory, Aizenberg focused on Venus' Flower Basket, a milky-looking undulant sponge shaped like a tapering tube. Though common in hobbyist's aquariums, it is native to the deep ocean, thriving in cold, crushing pressures a thousand feet below the surface.

For materials scientists like Aizenberg, Venus' Flower Basket is an intriguing package. At 500 million years old, it's very low on the evolutionary tree. But its layered superstructure of glass illustrates how strong nature makes things, and with what apparent ease.

The first commercially practical glass fibers were not invented until the 1930s, said Aizenberg, yet "sponges knew how to do it a half-billion years ago."

And they knew how to do it better, she pointed out. The glass fibers of Venus' Flower Basket are a hundred times stronger than the man-made version. Intricately layered, and reinforced with a still-mysterious glue, these glass fibers stop cracks fast.

The sponge also forms glass fibers at ambient temperatures and without any special steps. Man-made glass fibers require high temperatures — 2,000 degrees F — as well as chemical treatments in an expensive and energy-intensive "clean" lab.

Low temperatures also assure that the hollow centers of the sponge's glass fibers, though only 200 nanometers wide, are not deformed by intense heat.

Both man-made and sponge glass fibers "guide light," said Aizenberg, but nature does it better. Along the length of a sponge's glass fiber, spines multiply the efficiency of collecting light from nearby biophosphorescent organisms. "You can think of it as a Christmas tree," she said. "Not just the tip collects light."

Venus' Flower Basket illustrates nature's grasp of optics, said Aizenberg, but it also offers insight into architecture.

The resilient sponge is made of square cells reinforced by strutlike diagonal buttresses. In fact, a very modern principle of design and civil engineering, she said, "is present in this [cellular] structure."

But these robust structures are present on a nanoscale, mechanically stable because of layered hollow glass fibers a hundredth as wide as a human hair. If they could be replicated at that scale, the resulting man made materials would be all the stronger. This is a "rich system," said Aizenberg, and studying it may prompt the design of new materials.

The Venus' Flower Basket may even offer new ways of looking at human-scale architecture — lessons in how structures best respond to force, for instance. The sponge is attached to the ocean floor, an anchoring point where shifting currents exert the highest stresses. But the sponge has evolved a clever strategy, connecting itself to the seabed by a system of flexible fibers. This swaying glass structure, said an admiring Aizenberg, "can survive any pressure that you can imagine."

She has already used models from the sea to inspire invention. A few years ago, while with Bell Laboratories at Lucent Technologies, she helped prove that crystalline optical arrays on the arms of the brittle star, a relative of the starfish, focus light better than any man-made device.

Mimicking nature's strategy — in this case, fluid pigment transfer — led to patents and patent applications for a new generation of "tunable" lenses.

But Aizenberg wants to go beyond the lessons nature offers in efficient optics, robust construction, and resilient materials. She is exploring "biomineralization." That's the way nature uses organic catalysts to prompt inorganic materials to "grow" into lenses, glass fibers, and other useful structures.

In the aptly named Aizenberg Biomineralization and Biomimetics Lab at SEAS, researchers are looking into the "self-assembly" of inorganic materials the way nature might do it: efficiently and in ambient temperatures.

Vibrant witch hazel is a pretty cure-all for a winter woodland fairytale

2008-12-02T03:19:00.000-08:00

By Chris Beardshaw
Last updated at 3:58 PM on 01st December 2008

As aftershave or cures for bites and bruises, potent witch hazel has a punchy zing. But the hamamelis plant is far from overpowering and it comes into its own at this time of year.
It belongs to the hamamelidaceae group, a broad range of shrubs and trees that include the autumn colouring parrotia, spring-flowering fothergilla and glowing autumn tints of liquidambar.
Closely related to hazel and rose, in early winter the hamamelis appears as a collection of stiff, broadly upright stems emerging from a single trunk.

In the wild, it can be found in sparse woodlands, scrub and clearings in the mountains of North America and Eastern Asia. This makes it ideal for garden borders, so long as it is sheltered by walls and hedges.
It needs lots of organic matter. Indeed, you can't apply too much well-rotted compost or leaf mould as this fibrous material mimics the dense soils of the wild, ensuring the fine and shallow roots of the plants have plenty of nutrients.
There are a glut of hamamelis plants for sale, but they are bred from only a handful of species.

Hamamelis mollis, the Chinese witch hazel, is widely available. It is a well-behaved, well-proportioned plant, which produces golden yellow blooms on bare branches from December until spring.
These flowers are a curious collection of thin petals bundled together along smooth stems. Each flower has four petals that are fancifully curled in bud, golden on the tip and dark maroon or russet in the heart.
Hamamelis mollis and its many cultivars are known for their sweet fragrance, which is triggered by sunshine. Best-known is goldcrest, a compact plant with scarlet-centred blooms. It is ideal in gardens where the vibrant floral displays are contrasted with a ground cover of lush evergreen ferns, snow-white cyclamen or smoky tinted helleborus orientalis hybrids.
The Japanese witch hazel, hamamelis japonica, is a more open shrub. It appears unkempt and is more suited to wild gardens and woodlands.
It, too, carries yellow blooms, but they are paler, with ruffled edges. The form sulphurea is sought after due to its zesty tones and long flowering period. The finest and most potent fragrance is from the H. mollis, and the hairy foliage of this plant helps distinguish it from the smooth surface of the Chinese forms.
These Eastern plants have been subject to many breeding programmes and one result is hamamelis x intermedia.
The form of this hybrid is more like the hamamelis mollis, as are the large, rounded leaves. Yet it is earlier flowering, flushing with blooms that have retained the much-loved scent, from early winter. Strangely, although neither parent displays petals in orange or red, the hybrid forms of H. X intermedia are particularly showy. If an opulent and rich shade is required, then all-gold is a favourite, but for rusty and copper tints try the tantalising H. Jalena. These combine nicely with drifts of snow-white galanthus.
Due to their smaller and more temperamental flowers, few of the American forms are available in nurseries. But, look out for Sandra, a cultivar which produces intense purple leaves in spring.
Also look out for hamamelis virginiana, which is found in the wild from Ontario to Florida. While it lacks the floral beauty of the Asian species, it is prized for its robust rootstocks and for providing witch hazel medicine, used to reduce swelling and bruising of the skin.
Considered to be some of the finest winter-flowering shrubs, the hamamelis are often over-looked when it comes to foliage displays, but in autumn they are resplendent in deep shades of yellow, orange and red — and often all three.
They are robust plants that rarely suffer from ailments. The most common is foliage bleeding, from lush green to chlorotic yellow. This is generally caused by excess lime in the soil — plants grow in acidic conditions in the wild.
In garden soils where lime is present, opt for the H. Intermedia cultivars, which perform even on a clay soil over lime.
These plants need minimal pruning — just the odd trimming out of dead wood or removal of crossing stems — to develop a handsome structure.
With their warming display and enticing scent, the hamamelis can transform the winter garden.
Enjoy Hamamelis jelena (witch hazel) — winner of the prestigious RHS Award of Garden Merit — bursting with red autumn foliage and elegant coppery orange flowers in early to mid-winter.
Perfect as part of an ever-changing shrub border. Grows to height of 4m (13ft). Buy one root-balled plant for £20.99. Free P& P on all orders.
Please send orders to: Daily Mail Offers, Dept MC163, PO Box 99, Sudbury, Suffolk CO10 2SN.
Cheques should be made out to Daily Mail offers. Order online at plantoffers.com/MC163 or call 0845 155 8725 (quote MC163) for credit/debit card orders. Delivery to UK addresses only. Plants supplied as a root ball, dispatched from February 2009.
Please refer to classified section for full terms & conditions. Your contract for supply of goods is with Thompson & Morgan (YP) Ltd.

BE A FLOWER HELPER (OR JUST AN ADMIRER) AT THE WORLD’S BIGGEST FLOWER PARADE

2008-11-29T17:09:00.000-08:00

December 1, 2008 (Pasadena) — For a unique adventure just up the road, you can help behind the scenes in the days before the Jan. 1st Tournament of Roses Parade in Pasadena. The parade will be seen by 40 million people on Jan. 1 on TV networks including HGTV. Each float is decorated with more flowers than the average florist will use in five years!

You can volunteer to help decorate a float at the Rose Bowl Stadium's Rosemont Pavilion, 700 Seco St., Pasadena (626) 795-4171 or http://www.tournamentofroses.com/ . The Bayer Advanced Garden of Oz float, with a lion, tin man and other characters, is one of many that will have to be covered in flowers in the three days before the parade at this float site, called a “float barn”.

Or, you can arrive for the parade itself Jan. 1 and stay for the post parade “up close” tour of the floats into the first couple days of January. The website gives the details.

Bough Wow! How to give an instant appeal to your garden with a clever use of trees

2008-11-15T20:10:00.000-08:00

TREES are a must-have in any garden – and with National Tree Week starting on November 26 there’s no better time to get planting…

ARCH

Laburnum can create a floral tunnel to link different parts of the garden. Choose the free-flowering variety Vossii, which produces long yellow flowers in June and few of the poisonous seeds.

EXPERT TIP: If laburnum is trained to make a tunnel, pruning is vital to keep the growth in order and encourage flower buds, rather than more foliage.

HOW MUCH? £16.95 from Whispering Tree Nurseries (01366 388752, www.whispering-trees.co.uk).

TREE HOUSE

Kids love dens and a tree house is the ultimate hideaway. If sturdily built, they can also be a fabulous place for adults to read, write and dream.

EXPERT TIP: You’ll need a stout tree with at least two branches spreading in a V-shape from the trunk to support the tree house corners. Otherwise, you’ll need to build it on a platform suspended between two trees and two posts.

HOW MUCH? A custom-made luxury tree house costs from £2,500 from Toys For Boys (01869 278805, www.treeadventures.co.uk).

BIRDS

By putting up a nest box you can help birds and get pleasure from seeing them set up home. If you fix them to trees where birds like to perch they may also be used as a winter roost.

EXPERT TIP: Nest boxes are best put up from August to February. Site them in a quiet part of the garden sheltered from wind, rain and sun. Installing a bird box CCTV camera will add to your enjoyment!

HOW MUCH? Nest box and camera kit £69.95 (01736 756277, www.handykam.com).

CREEPERS

AS many trees have long periods where they provide little interest, it makes sense to brighten them up with flowering climbers. Clematis is a perfect choice.

EXPERT TIP: Plant the clematis away from the direct base of the tree to avoid competition for moisture and nutrients.

HOW MUCH? Four clematis £17 (0844 557 1850, www. vanmeuwen.co.uk).

Slug rings are a good defence, but also think about beetle banks

2008-11-04T01:09:00.000-08:00

Slugs dislike copper - how can you put this to good advantage?
I have a big slug problem in my garden, as I am constantly adding large quantities of organic matter to my soil. I have been using copper with my raised beds to find the best solution. On one bed I have added copper slug tape around the top, which seems to work well but it looks a bit Heath Robinson and is not cheap (4m costs £6.50). I am also adding 10mm copper pipe, hammered out flat around other beds. This will cost around £1.50/m. Copper lightening conductor (12.5mm thick and 1.5mm deep) is another option, but this is more expensive at £3.8m per metre run from Keison International (www.keison.co.uk, 01245 600 560).

I have just painted a thin band of new copper paint on two beds, which is a copper powder which you mix in with an epoxy resin and hardener and apply with a roller. It will cost around £80/ per square metre. Aside from deterring slugs and snails, it also looks decorative and will be available in the spring from Great Grass (www.greatgrass.co.uk; 0845 225 2114).

How about copper tools?
Many gardeners swear by them. This is very difficult to prove scientifically, but I have just bought a trowel (£24) from Implementations (0845 330 3148; www.implementations.co.uk) and am testing it out.

Any new research?
Nargis Gani, a PhD student has finished her research on slugs at Cardiff University, part sponsored by the Processors and Growers Research Organisation (www.pgro.org). Gani found that the common field slug avoided areas previously occupied by its four most common ground beetle predators. When slugs sense the presence of ground beetles they stop, raise the front of their bodies, and wave their heads from side to side, before turning away. Hopefully someone will create a product based on the extract of ground beetles for use as a slug deterrent. In the meantime, encouraging them with beetle banks works well.

How do you make a beetle bank?
Raise your soil by about 1 inch (for drainage) and grow tussocky grass such as Cocksfoot and Timothy. Let it form a thick, undisturbed thatch. This insulates the beetles from extreme temperatures. Add perennials such as yarrow, knapweed and wild carrot to pull in hover flies and ladybirds too. The Game and Wildlife Conservancy Trust (www.gct.org.uk) has measured 1,500 beneficial predators per sq metre.

The Grounded Gardener: 10 trees for a great fall color display

2008-10-22T21:18:00.000-07:00

By MARTY WINGATE
SPECIAL TO THE P-I

Think "fall color" and your mind automatically goes to the genus Acer. Maples offer a huge selection of trees that light up in autumn. But maples aren't the only show in the autumnal garden.

Those gardeners who have lost a maple to verticillium wilt -- a soil-borne fungus -- need to avoid most maples, because the disease persists in the soil. But anyone can enjoy the display put on by the following 10 trees.

Tupelo (Nyssa sylvatica) -- The colors range from apricot to red on this pyramid-shaped tree native to the Southeast. It prefers to grow in full sun or part shade, and acid soil. It will put up with wet, poorly drained sites, but also will tolerate dry soil once it's established. Mature size can be 40 feet high and 20 feet wide. 'Autumn Cascade' is a weeping variety.

Sourwood (Oxydendrum arboreum) -- Another native of the Southeastern U.S., sourwood shows its membership in the heather family by the fingerlike flower clusters that appear in fall (they look much like the flowers on a Pieris). The flowers show up well against the shocking red-orange color of the foliage. The best autumn color comes from trees planted in full sun. Sourwood has a columnar shape: It grows up to 25 feet high and 15 feet wide.

Beech (Fagus sylvatica) -- Fall turns the European beech from its summer green to warm gold. Its fine form (a large pyramid) and its mature size (60 feet high and 40 wide) can be daunting for smaller gardens. So look for 'Dawyck,' which grows tall but only about 10 feet wide (non-green forms 'Dawyck Purple' and 'Dawyck Gold' are available). Beech leaves make the best crunch underfoot on autumn walks.

Persian ironwood (Parrotia persica) -- Many members of the witch hazel family can be relied on for a good autumn show, and Parrotia is a prime example. Shades of orange, red and scarlet turn green leaves into a multi-hued extravaganza; for the best show, buy one now, so you can see its color. With a visually pleasing spread, the tree reaches about 30 feet high and wide; 'Vanessa' will reach the same height, but not as wide.

Washington hawthorn (Crataegus phaenopyrum) -- Great fall color from this disease-resistant hawthorn, but its ornamental qualities go beyond that: It has glossy green leaves and clusters of white spring flowers that develop into sprigs of red berries, much like a pyracantha (and thorns to match). You're already sold on its characteristics, and then comes the scarlet fall color. The Washington hawthorn grows about 30 feet high and wide.

Raywood ash (Fraxinus angustifolia 'Raywood') -- A fine street tree that offers an interesting turn on autumn color, the 'Raywood' ash turns from green to a chocolate maroon, then fires up into orange. Its compound leaves are divided into narrow leaflets, which gives a soft overall texture to the tree. It grows up to 35 feet high and 25 feet wide.

Crape myrtle (Lagerstroemia) -- More often seen as a shrub, but the single-trunk crape myrtles make fabulous small trees, as some gardeners are discovering. Although it's late to leaf out, the new growth makes up for it, glowing bronze-red. Panicles of late-summer flowers age to marble-size fruit, then, in late fall, leaves turn bright red. Overall, it's late, but worth it. Plus, mature bark becomes mottled with patches of gray, pink and brown. Look for: 'Centennial Spirit,' 'Dynamite' or any other selection that has been trained into a tree form (or enjoy it as a large shrub, multi-trunk style).

Japanese stewartia (Stewartia pseudocamellia) -- A small tree for light shade and protected places, it will repay you many times over for the care you take. Single, white, summer flowers are followed by red and orange fall color. Elegant pointed buds, pretty bronze new growth, flaky bark, a layered branching pattern and 25 feet high and 15 feet wide -- who could ask for anything more?

Ornamental pear (Pyrus) -- White spring flowers and glossy green leaves in summer give you two seasons, and fall color makes it three for ornamental pears. Be choosy when you select a variety, because older cultivars such as 'Capital' are prone to limbs breaking in snow or wind. 'Autumn Blaze' grows 30 feet high and 20 feet wide with scarlet fall color; 'Redspire' is slightly taller with yellow to red fall color.

Ginkgo biloba -- If only those ginkgos near Vantage had made it out of the Miocene period, we could call this a Northwest native tree. Still, it's a fine, tough tree for gardens, streets and public places. Its unusual leaves resemble a maidenhair fern frond. Bright green in summer, they turn to butter-yellow in fall. 'Princeton Sentry' grows 40 feet high and 15 wide; 'Saratoga' as tall and 30 feet wide; 'Autumn Gold' offers stronger fall highlights.

Marty Wingate, a Master Gardener, is the author of two garden books. She can be contacted at: martywin@earthlink.net. Her Web site, including a blog, is martywingate.com.

Thinning and Deadheading

2008-10-10T01:56:00.001-07:00

Garden phlox is susceptible to mildew, especially when the plants are growing in dense clumps.

Thinning and deadheading are two measures that add to the good looks of your garden. Thinning refers to selectively eliminating plants or stems. The end result is a more attractive and healthier garden.

To reduce the threat of mildew, improve air circulation by thinning out dense strands of phlox. Cut some stems to the ground.

If your garden contains mildew-prone perennials, such as phlox and beebalm (Monarda didyma), you must ensure adequate air circulation to deter the formation of the fungus. This is simply a matter of periodically cutting enough stems to the ground so that the remaining ones are not crowded. Such surgery in no way harms the plant. Thinning must be done regularly, however, because once mildew sets in it is hard to control without resorting to chemicals.

When deadheading mums and other perennials, cut back the stem to the next set of leaves below the flower head.

One easy way to thin plants is to inspect new shoots in the spring. If—as is often the case with phlox—they appear crowded together, simply cut out the woody center of each clump. Do not simply pick off the old flower heads, or the plants will be left with unattractive bare stems.

Deadheading is a grim-sounding term that describes cutting off the unattractive dead heads of flowers in your beds and borders. While deadheading is not essential, it certainly provides great rewards by prolonging the bloom period of most plants, preventing self-seeders from seeding, and ensuring a freshness and neatness in the garden.

Most plants are genetically programmed to produce seeds. Once seed is produced, the plant’s function is completed and it can appropriately wither or simply settle in as a foliage plant. If you cut the flower before the seed sets, however, the plant must produce another flower in order to fulfill its goal. The glory of modern breeding is the creation of sterile cultivars; these literally do not know how to stop producing flowers. If you wish to reduce deadheading in your perennial garden, choose sterile cultivars.

http://www.caymannetnews.com/news-10634--6-6---.html

Gardening: The 20 best spring bulbs

2008-09-21T03:55:00.000-07:00

Elspeth Thompson chooses the bulbs to plant now and enjoy later

For me there is something unfailingly cheering and hopeful about bulb-planting – it even helped me through the death of a muchloved dog one sad October. It can be tiring if large numbers are involved, so alternate the big naturalistic swaths with handfuls of delicate beauties in pots that can be brought inside when coming into bloom – and keep plenty of plant labels, sharpened pencils, hot soup and Radio 3 to hand. As this year's leaves are yellowing and falling to the ground, it's heartening to be lighting the touch-paper of next spring's growth. For, once set beneath their blanket of soil and watered in, these nuggets of concentrated life will be imperceptibly stirring towards their moment of glory in a few months' time.
Best planted indoors, in pots of soil or in glass bowls filled with pebbles and water, with the bases of the bulbs just touching the surface. Their fragrance will fill a room.

How to give your garden autumn impact

2008-09-15T05:05:00.000-07:00

Rather than hanging up your trowel this autumn, you could take the opportunity to introduce some fabulous seasonal stunners to your plot.

Right now your garden centre is packed with an amazing array of autumnal bloomers just waiting to be planted. Here’s my choice..

Pretty in pink: Japanese anemones – x hybrida

Perfect for anyone who loves pink or white classic flowers, this herbaceous perennial will produce a fantastic flower-covered clump 3ft or 4ft (90-120cm) tall.

The flowers thrive best in shady, moist soil but will perform well just about anywhere. They also make great cut flowers.

Butterfly magnet: Sedum spectabile

These wonderful fleshy-leaved plants do best in a really sunny and freely drained spot, producing masses of flat flowerheads composed of zillions of dusky pink star-like flowers.

If, like me, you have a heavy soil, they still do well but don’t last quite so many years. This is also a great plant for attracting butterflies, which cover the blooms to feed from their nectar. If you like white flowers, go for iceberg.

Triple whammy: Cyclamen europaeum

This magical plant comes with heart-shaped dark green leaves, each marbled with white patterns, and rich pink flowers with a distinct perfume. It does best in a limey and fairly moist, but not wet, soil in partial shade. They look wonderful growing beneath a large shrub or tree and after a few years will multiply and spread.

Autumn classic: Chrysanthemums

Bedding chrysanths come in a range of classic colours. My favourites are the mahoganies and golds, which make a wonderful addition to the front of a small border or patio pot. Light shade or sun suits them best. Mostly they’re treated as annuals and discarded once winter comes, but if you’ve got a greenhouse you can often keep them for the following year.

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Mellow yellow: Sternbergia lutea – the autumn daffodil

This hardy bulb loves a well-drained alkaline soil and plenty of sun. It will reward you with bright yellow cup-shaped flowers, rather like giant crocuses. It’s great in a rock garden, at the edge of a sunny bed, or planting hole in your patio.

Dizzy daisy: Rudbeckia fulgida – cone flower

These dizzily pretty, bright yellow daisies with their prominent dark brown, raised centres thrive in sun or partial shade.

The variety Goldstrum is one of my favourites but all are great value at this time of year. The shadier the spot, the better they like it and the taller they grow.

Bright things: Dahlias

Red, yellow, orange, white or cream, there’s a dahlia for everyone. They’re easily grown from seed or tubers planted earlier in the year, or you’ll be able to pick plants in flower now in your local garden centre. A sunny spot with a moist soil works best.

Simply stunning: Crocosmias

With their elegant arching flower spikes clad with starry orange, red or golden flowers and sword-like leaves, these flowers are simply irresistible.

A sunny spot that’s well drained yet regularly supplied with water in the drier months makes a perfect site – great in flowerbeds or good-sized pots.

Pippa Greenwood has presented her own series, Growing Science, on Radio 4 for three years and is a regular panelist on the station’s Gardeners’ Question Time. She’s also written many books including Pippa Greenwood’s Gardening Year (Headline, £16.99).

Send us pictures of your garden and your tips, and we’ll print the best ones. Your Life, Daily Mirror, 1 Canada Square, Canary Wharf, London E14 5AP; email pippagreenwood@mirror.co.uk

Slow Food Nation Victory Garden Stays For Now

2008-09-02T16:30:00.000-07:00

That flower and vegetable garden at Civic Center -- the one that will, eventually, allow all of us to eat cake, or whatever -- gets a stay of execution. Since there has been a dubious "outpouring of public support" for the garden since its installation in early July," Mayor Gavin Newsom plans on keeping that garden in front of city hall until root vegetable season. Yay. We guess.

What is the Victory Garden, you ask? Well, it makes people feel good about themselves, for one. Also, the garden, it seems, involves World Wars I & II and something called "food miles." Check it:

About Victory Gardens 2008+ Victory Gardens 2008+ is a program of Garden for the Environment and the City of San Francisco's Department for the Environment. A two-year pilot project to support the transition of backyard, front yard, window boxes, rooftops and unused land into organic food production areas, Victory Gardens 2008+ derives its title from, and build on, the successful nationwide Victory Garden programs of WWI and WWII. Victory Gardens 2008+, however, redefines "Victory" in the pressing context of urban sustainability. "Victory" is growing food at home for increased local food security and reducing the food miles associated with the average American meal.
Anyway, you have until November to see it before the Victory Garden gets raped and pillaged by a horde of Black and Decker Weed Whackers.

Get ready for fall

2008-08-25T04:40:00.000-07:00

Donna Balzer, CanWest News Service
Published: Saturday, August 23, 2008
Just as gardeners get things right and ready, it seems the evenings cool and systems start to fail. If you've been away, you know there's some work to do when you arrive home, but even if you are at home it can be a certainty to walk out in the garden one morning to the sinking feeling that things have changed.

Just before I took off last week for a little beach time, I noticed things beginning to falter and took some action by cutting back certain plants.

First off we had hail. This isn't by itself troublesome for plants, although it does create a bit of a mess. After cutting back annual flower stems that were stripped of blooms and leaves I then started randomly cutting back perennials. Luckily I didn't get the kind of hail damage that dents cars and pierces tree bark. When that happens, it could mean trouble because the pierced bark is open to infection and invites fungal and insect problems.

A tree with this kind of hail damage can only be watched -- rather than pruned -- because we just don't know where or when it will start attracting pests or diseases. Any leaves remaining on a hail-affected tree should be left in place and not reduced further with additional pruning.

RATTY PERENNIALS

But back to the ratty perennials. Yes, there were a few perennials damaged by hail, but others were simply and suddenly less than appealing to me. As I was removing hail damage, I started removing perfectly good plants that had just worn out their welcome. Some very tall tarragon that I had previously used to flavour soup suddenly seemed tall and weedy. And my oregano had reseeded everywhere while I wasn't looking, so I decided to leave one or two small seedlings, but the main plant had to go.

In a very tiny yard, plants that aren't useful for more than one thing in more than one season can't be justified.

Meanwhile, people have been phoning me during my CBC radio show about early signs of powdery mildew on their plants. I looked extra hard but didn't see the telltale signs of this fungus on any of my plants.

If you notice white spots on caragana leaves, it's likely a fungus commonly called powdery mildew.

Early studies have shown that aerated compost tea applied regularly before any signs of fungus appear can reduce or eliminate damage, but once the signs of fungus are noticed, it is too late to do anything.

Suddenly, older lower leaves are black and hanging on but are obviously distressed.

Because there are no easy organic options effective in controlling mildew once it is showing, most gardeners use the old school cutting back method.

With the sexual stage suddenly right around the bend with its small black fruiting bodies on the leaves, it is good to cut the plants back now. If left in the garden once the spore stage is obvious, the fungus over-winters.

In our climate, gardeners with early signs of mildew might want to remove leaves affected as they work in their garden this month.

Yes, the trouble will go away once our first frost comes but if there are signs of fruiting bodies, the disease will be back in full force next summer.

In other words, it's time to get out the shears to removed hail damage and fungal damage and just plain old ugly plant damage.

ON THE WEB

- Excellent information about powdery mildew from the University of Guelph can be found at uoguelph.ca

- For more about aerated compost tea: check out soilfoodweb.com or healthycalgary.ca

How to grow: Scabiosa caucasica

2008-08-22T16:32:00.000-07:00

The large, lavender-blue flowers of the Caucasian scabious (S. caucasica) have been a cut-flower staple for 150 years or more. But I value these frilly flowers for the contribution they make in the garden rather than the vase. These silver-washed beauties shine in July, August and September, when sunny yellows and oranges dominate. Their delicate presence is a gentle relic of a summer almost gone.

Scabiosa caucasica was introduced into Britain in 1803 after seed collected from the Caucasus was sent to the Hackney nurseryman George Loddiges. In the wild it is found in cool meadows and in the garden this plant seems to peak once the heat of summer starts to wane.

'Clive Greaves' is a selected seedling originally grown by market gardener James House, who ran a successful nursery near Bristol. The House family had previously dubbed a white form 'Miss Willmott' in honour of Ellen Willmott who gardened at Warley Place in Essex. They also developed their own seed strain, usually known as House's hybrids, which are still available from Thompson & Morgan as young plants and seed (01473 695225; www. thompson-morgan.com).

'Clive Greaves', launched in 1929, has outperformed the others thanks to its strong constitution and free-flowering habit and has never been bettered. The real Clive Greaves was a racy young salesman who worked for Hewitt's Nursery in Solihull. He promised to sell any plant named after him in huge quantities - and succeeded. But if the teetotal James House had realised how good a plant 'Clive Greaves' was, he would never have named it after a man reputedly fond of wine, women and song.

However, the lavender-blue 'Clive Greaves' became popular quickly and has survived for nearly 80 years. Admittedly, there are more striking blue selections of S. caucasica. 'Fama' is an intense purple-blue with a silvery centre and 'Stafa' is a light-centred darker blue. But both are less floriferous and harder to place than 'Clive Greaves'.

All scabious are highly attractive to bees and butterflies. Our summer-flowering native, Scabiosa columbaria, is a compact, filigree-leaved plant with wiry stems topped by tiny Cambridge-blue pincushions. But perhaps the best small-flowered scabious of all is the sterile hybrid 'Butterfly Blue' - sometimes wrongly sold as 'Irish Perpetual'. It will flower continually from June until late autumn, whether dead-headed or not. This first-rate perennial is often sold in bright pink pots that doesn't exactly encourage the serious gardener. But I'm glad I overcame my prejudice. However, the pink-flowered version ('Pink Mist') is not as good - stragglier in habit and very prone to mildew.

The first scabious ever introduced was the small-flowered S. atropurpurea in 1591. This species comes from warmer areas of southern Europe. Often sultry and dark, it was given the common name "mournful widow". Although it is technically listed as a short-lived perennial, few survive my Cotswold winters so I have to treat it as an annual. Seed companies often sell mixtures of white and dark, or plummy forms under names such as 'Musical Score' and 'Beaujolais Bonnets'. There is also 'Chile Black'; these atropurpurea types often have clean white stamens that embroider their dark pincushions.

Other good garden scabious include the exuberant and man-high June-flowering Cephalaria gigantea. Long-stemmed, lemon-yellow pincushions emerge from green buds that are diamond-patterned in black - wonderful if you have enough room. I also much admire the wine-red buttons of Knautia macedonica that billow out from June onwards, getting tinier and airier as the season wears on.

How to grow

All scabious prefer well-drained soil and a sunny position. They dislike cold, wet winters. A top dressing of grit in October will aid surface drainage. However they also hate hot, humid weather and do best in temperate conditions.

S. caucasica has long stems that initially produce one large flower. But if you snip the dying flower stem back to the lowest buds, halfway down, two slightly shorter-stemmed flowers will spring from the bud axils.

Deadheading encourages plants to flower on and on. But many scabious (and related genera) set seed prolifically if left. Seeds can be collected in autumn, dried and sown the following spring without losing viability.

Both S. caucasica and S. atropurpurea will flower in their first year if sown by March; the seeds germinate easily. Pot up individual seedlings into small pots and plant out by May. Selected forms like 'Clive Greaves' need to be divided to remain true to type as any seedlings are likely to be variable. Division can be done in spring but only once the plant has begun to grow away.

Good companions

Scabious are excellent support acts for late-flowering roses. The lavender-blue flowers of 'Clive Greaves' highlight any cream and apricot roses. They also make excellent subjects for a cutting garden. Darker, dainty-flowered penstemons work well with 'Clive Greaves'; the dark 'Blackbird' or 'Evelyn' (a mid-pink with deep magenta markings) contrast well.

Soft blue also looks stunning against dark purple foliage, so growing an upright sedum like 'Purple Emperor', 'Xenox' or 'Karfunkelstein' with scabious will enhance both.

Where to buy

Hopleys Plants, Much Hadham, Hertfordshire (01279 842509; www.hopleys.co.uk).

Farmyard Nurseries, Llandysul, Carmarthenshire (01559 363389; www.farmyardnurseries.co.uk).

Macplants, Pencaitland, East Lothian (01875 341179; www.macplants.co.uk). More reader offers online telegraph.co.uk/gardening Reader offer

Reader offer

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Forget the calendar: spring's here

2008-08-19T06:38:00.000-07:00

When it comes to horticulture, spring has already sprung in many Australian cities.

So you can ignore the formal start of the season on September 1 and get stuck into your spring gardening now if you want the biggest, brightest, most fragrant blooms in your street.

Most Australians tend to associate spring with the three month period starting from September, says Dr Tim Entwisle, executive director of Sydney's Royal Botanic Gardens Trust. But it effectively starts a month earlier in cities with mild winters such as Sydney, Perth and Brisbane.
Dr Entwisle says many native plants start flowering in Sydney in late July, but September is the best month for other types of flowers, so there's still plenty of time to prepare your garden.

"In Sydney, if you go up into the mountains, you get a whole different climate and spring starts a month or two later than in the city," he says.

"In Melbourne, Hobart and Adelaide, wattles start in August but a lot of the spring flowering is best in September.

"Darwin doesn't really have spring: it really only has the dry and the wet.
"The start of spring varies greatly in a country as huge as Australia."

So how do you know if it is spring yet where you live? It's simple, he says: be observant and note when the first blooms appear.

"Don't get hung up on a season - you'll notice changes," he says.

"Get in tune with the seasons. Also, don't get select plants that struggle to grow in your area. Look around your neighbourhood and see what is going well.

"And no matter where you are, use lots of compost and a well mulched soil, which helps with the water restrictions that are in place across much of Australia.''

Dr Entwisle says a visit to your city's botanic gardens can provide inspiration for gardeners seeking the best flowering plants for their climate.

"Wisteria perform well - sometimes too well in Sydney - and are vigorous climbers that need training and pruning.

"However, in the right spot, they're tough and rewarding, and provide a two week window of seasonal bliss with their joyous colour. Some of the most durable flowers we've planted at the Sydney gardens include pansies, primulas and snowflakes, and shrubs such as spiraea, rondeletia, brunfelsia, heliotrope and loropetalum.

"These would grow well in most southern parts of Australia and they're flowering now."

Dr Entwisle says roses aren't suited to central Sydney and prefer drier climates such as Perth, where native paper daisies flourish, providing a riot of spring colour.

"Roses and camellias don't require a lot of water - they're tough."

Boronias, wax flowers and wattles (acacia) are out in force in August across Australia, particularly in Melbourne and Hobart, he says.

"Someone once said there is a wattle in flower somewhere in Australia at any time and that's probably true.

"Some people have a problem with hay fever but I particularly enjoy the smell of wattle - it brings back childhood memories. Also, sweet pittosporum can be weedy but it smells fantastic."

Beware with the latter species: sweet pittosporum, which is sometimes called mock orange, is considered a weed outside its native New South Wales.

Dr Entwisle says bulbs such as jonquils and tulips are coming up in Australia's southern cities. Tulips require more care than other flowering plants but are well worth it, he says.

"Here at the gardens, we keep tulip bulbs in the crisper of the fridge for between four-to-six weeks after they arrive to us from Tasmania.

"This both initiates flowering in the bulbs and improves size and quality of blooms.

"After planting the tulips, they're relatively easy to care for with few pest problems and low water requirements if they're planted in rich, improved soil."

Gardeners who want to attract birds to their garden would probably already know that grevillea does a fine job, but Dr Entwisle warns the genus could sometimes attract "pest birds".

"Indian mynas are a pest bird around Sydney that like grevillias but can take over from fairy wrens and robins," he says. "Banksias can provide a good habitat for birds, providing a tangled bush where they can hide from predators."

Gardening: Pretty in pinks

2008-08-11T17:29:00.000-07:00

We're a fickle bunch when it comes to flowers. Styles come and go, with hybrid tea roses and dahlias among the many blooms that have risen and fallen in favour over the years - and, in some cases, risen again. One of the latest to make a comeback is the old-fashioned English pink, lovely in our gardens now in all shades of pink, red and white, with the characteristic frilly (or "pinked") edging to the petals.

Pinks have been grown in Britain for centuries. Dianthus plumarius was probably brought over by Norman monks in the 11th century and can still be found growing around ancient ruins. Widely cultivated in Elizabethan times for their sweet, spicy scent, which masks a multitude of other less lovely smells, pinks grew in popularity until by the 19th century there were hundreds of varieties. Many were raised by John Thomas Sinkins, master of the Slough Workhouse, after whose wife the beautiful double white 'Mrs Sinkins', still popular today, was named.

The main problem with the old-fashioned pinks was their short flowering period. Around the turn of the 20th century, a Sussex nurseryman, Montagu Allwood, bred the first of many modern pinks by crossing the old varieties with a perpetual-flowering carnation.

The offspring, which include the pink and dark crimson 'Doris', bright pink 'Bovey Belle' and fragrant double-lavender 'Lily the Pink', tend to have longer stems as well as more frequent flushes of flowers, making them enormously valuable for cutting.

Ironically, if the carnation helped swell the popularity of pinks, it also contributed to their downfall. Larger, showier and with longer, stronger stems, border carnations soon overtook pinks as florists' favourites. By the mid-1990s, you hardly ever saw pinks for sale as cut flowers and they were rarely, if ever, promoted at garden centres. To cap it all, as carnations became ever-more ubiquitous, their bright colours and long vase life made them the definitive supermarket or garage forecourt flower and the image of pinks began to suffer by association.

Thankfully, all that is changing. Championed at this year's Chelsea Flower Show, and now stocked by the likes of Sarah Raven (0870 1913430, www.sarahraven.com), pinks are very much back in style - from small native species such as the 'Cheddar pink' (Dianthus gratianopolitanus), with its loose mats of flat, pale pink flowers, to the fancy "laced" varieties with their contrasting edgings, to modern types in bold shades. I love to see a mixture of them, in both the vase and the border, the more intricate patterns and colour combinations alternated with pure whites, pale pinks or the odd red or purple.

The classic way to grow them is in bands edging a path, where passers-by can revel in their fragrance.

Pinks have few requirements but one of them is an alkaline, well-drained soil. If you do not have such terrain at your disposal, it might be advisable to plant in pots where you can mix in lime, grit and gravel.

For a contemporary look, try growing them in salvaged galvanized tubs and buckets; the matt silvery grey of the metal is a great foil for the grey-green leaves and shows off the range of colours to perfection. 'Gran's Favourite' - with raspberry-ripple edging to the pure white flowers - is one of the most decorative.

The boom in British-grown cut flowers has also played a part in the revival of pinks, with Waitrose selling the flowers again for the first time in a decade. The supermarket is working with a specialist grower in Lincolnshire to supply them with a range of varieties including 'Gran's Favourite', 'Bright Eyes' and 'Lily the Pink'. For the chance to win a large bunch of Waitrose pinks and a case of pink wine from the Chapel Down Winery in Kent, see our competition in the panel on this page.

Win pinks and a case of rosé

Waitrose is giving away a large bunch of deliciously scented English pinks along with a case of English rosé (Chapel Down's 'English Rose') to five lucky Sunday Telegraph readers.

To enter, simply answer the question: In which English county are Waitrose pinks grown?

Send your answer, with your name, address and telephone number to Waitrose Pinks Competition, Press Office, Waitrose Ltd, Southern Industrial Area, Bracknell, Berks, RG12 8YA, to arrive by Aug 17.

For more details of Waitrose's support of British growers, visit www.waitrose.com/blossomandbloom.

Growing colorful clematis in smaller gardens

2008-08-09T04:21:00.000-07:00

Clematis has been a garden favorite for centuries. By the end of the 1800s, in fact, there were more than 500 clematis cultivars available for garden use.

Of these classics, nearly 50 are still marketed, including the 1858 'Jackmanii' cultivar. Beautiful alone on a support or as a companion for roses, this antique hybrid with purple-blue flowers remains today's most popular clematis cultivar.

British nurseryman George Jackman, who introduced this large-flowered perennial in 1858, recommended training it to grow over tree stumps – which is certainly easier than removing the stumps. Not everyone has or wants old stumps on their property, so some 19th-century gardeners used 'Jackmanii' and other clematises as weaver plants. They would peg clematis to the ground to direct the vines to weave through the open spaces between flower beds.

There are many "genteel" clematises perfectly suited for easy management in compact gardens. Profiling 150 of them is Raymond J. Evison's goal in Clematis for Small Spaces, a sumptuously illustrated, deeply informed book that features shorter-growing, disease-resistant and long-flowering clematises ideal for borders, patios, decks, hanging baskets and even indoor containers.

Mr. Evison, who owns a clematis nursery in England, raises key issues when considering which species or cultivars to purchase: vine height, blooming period, flower size and color. He also offers ample cultivation advice, which can be applied to North Texas conditions.
Perhaps the biggest problem with growing clematis in North Texas is the need to offset the effects of summer heat and drought. The lack of adequate and regularly available moisture damages clematis foliage and flowers. It can also produce symptoms that mimic fungal wilt.

Clematis thrives on rainwater and insists on cool roots. One simple way to manage this requirement is to locate the vine on the northern or eastern side of a structure, such as a fence. This structure will shade clematis roots during the hottest hours of the day. You also can mulch it heavily and plant small, leafy plants at clematis' feet to shade the roots.

China might be the epicenter for clematis – most certainly originate there – but America has its own clematises. Leatherflower (C. pitcheri), for example, is a lavender-hued native of East Texas thickets that has been hybridized for gardens.

So has scarlet clematis (C. texensis), a low-climbing Edwards Plateau wildflower. It is not the easiest clematis to maintain in North Texas, but it stands out as the only known wild red-flowered clematis species in the world.

Bill Scheick is a garden writer and professor of American literature and culture at the University of Texas at Austin.

Clematis for

Small Spaces

Raymond J. Evison

flower garden

2008-08-09T04:20:00.001-07:00

Garden paradise opened for bees

2008-07-28T05:35:00.000-07:00

A wildlife garden which aims to boost survival rates for bumblebees has opened at the University of Stirling.

The Bumblebee Conservation Trust hope the space will act as an example to gardeners on how they can help save the threatened insect.

They have planted a range of wild flowers known to attract the bees.

Experts believe the growth in popularity of commercial bedding plants is contributing to the decline of the UK's bee population.

Lucie Southern, a conservation officer with the trust, said: "We want to encourage gardeners to consider more "cottage garden" plants and wildflowers, such as flowering heather and flowering currants in the spring, honeysuckle, foxgloves, lupins, teasel and herbs such as mint, thyme and sage in the summer, then lavender, buddleia, cornflowers and hollyhocks for the autumn.

"Lots of bedding plants have been bred to increase colour, bloom size, shape and "showiness" at the expense of the nectar which plants produce.

"And often these blooms have such complex petal configurations, that bees can't enter the flower to reach whatever nectar might exist."

Ms Southern said that if gardeners planted a couple of bumblebee-friendly plants, it would help halt their decline.

Bees pollinate the vast majority of flowering crops and wild flowers.

Without pollination, crops like beans, peas, strawberries and raspberries will fail to produce harvests.

The garden has been opened on the north side of the campus by Hermitage Wood and will be permanently accessible to the public.

A garden reborn

2008-07-22T06:12:00.000-07:00

On July 4, 1996, Mark and Gina Capiello sat in rocking chairs on the deck of their house on Dune Road in Westhampton. The chairs were the only furniture they had. They drank a glass of wine and watched the fireworks. It was a magical evening.

The couple once thought they’d never sit in that spot again.

Five years earlier, during the Halloween storm of 1991, the Capiellos lost their small summer house and garden to the pounding waves. It was one of 200 homes destroyed by the storm.

Although the beach had been eroding along the ocean, their little 1950s cottage had been protected, or so they thought, by 250 feet of 20-foot-tall black pines and beautiful, deep pink roses. But after the storm, their half-acre property was barren, covered by a 5-foot layer of sand and debris. Every tree, every bush, every flower, all were gone. Not a single piece of vegetation survived.

The Capiellos began the long and arduous task of cleaning up and starting over. “We spent the next five years in rental houses while we picked up and piled debris,” Ms. Capiello said. They did not plan to rebuild their house, but “then a miracle happened.” The Army Corps of Engineers “fixed the beach.”

The Capiellos love the beach so much that they decided to build a new house—and create a new garden—on their property.

They began by planting beachgrass during the first fall and winter to help stabilize the sand. It was painstaking work—they planted thousands of grass plugs, one at a time. “It was,” said Mr. Capiello, “like planting your front lawn blade by blade.”

At the time, the Capiellos were living and working in the city and could work on their property only on the weekends. “It was good winter exercise,” Ms. Capiello said with a laugh. “Thank God we were younger then!”

The following spring, they began creating a windbreak of black pines, bayberry and autumn olive to protect what would become the new garden. They had more than 150 yards of compost dumped in a giant pile in the “front yard,” and “we took it a wheelbarrow full at a time,” Ms. Capiello said, putting it into the bottom of the holes they dug for the small trees and shrubs.

Sometimes, help arrived from unexpected quarters. One chilly fall day as they were digging away, preparing to plant 20 5-foot pines, “our friend Bruce Hubbard came by with a backhoe, pulled down our driveway and just smiled and starting digging holes,” she recalled. They planted the trees in a soft, natural pattern, close enough together to slow the force of the strong winds and trap some of the salt they carry.

Both the Capiellos had some gardening experience as kids. Ms. Capiello’s mother has always loved flowers, and the family home always had a beautiful garden, she said. When Gina was in seventh grade, the family moved to a house in Bronxville that had been owned by avid gardeners, and she has fond memories of cutting armloads of flowers to bring indoors.

Mr. Capiello learned gardening from his father. “From the time he was a child, his dad had him in the garden, planting trees, digging French drains, and working on their vegetable garden,” Ms. Capiello explained.

The Capiellos put all their gardening knowledge to work, and gained a lot more along the way. They were among the first to rebuild in what is now the Village of West Hampton Dunes.

“After a couple of years of work on our garden, we could see our trees and the curved driveway from the airplane window when we would return from our business travels abroad. It was a true oasis in the sand,” Ms. Capiello said.

The couple built raised beds and stone retaining walls, and added irrigation where they needed it. Slowly, the garden rose from the sand and took shape.

“We battled the strong winds, the salty air and the hungry deer,” Ms. Capiello said. “After 10 years of satisfying effort, our garden looks like it has always been here.”

Their “front lawn,” closest to Dune Road, is a mix of American beachgrass, beach pea, bayberry, black pines, rugosa roses, and ox-eye daisies—a favorite of Ms. Capiello. “In June,” she said, “it’s an explosion of pink and white.”

Close to the house, raised beds along the driveway are filled with perennials and shrubs. The beds are full of summer color. The perennial palette mixes reds, pinks and blues, freshened with white. The brightest red comes from the incendiary blossoms of Crocosmia Lucifer. A shrub rose, a fuchsia Meidiland variety, blooms all summer. Purply pinks are contributed by a summer phlox (Norah Leigh) and purple coneflower (

Echinacea purpurea

‘Magnus’).

On the cooler end of the spectrum are blue false indigo (

Baptisia australis

), with its pea-like flowers and rattling seed pods, and sea holly (Sapphire Blue), whose spiny-tipped steel blue flowers contribute their offbeat sculptural shapes. Bright whites come from Shasta daisies and intensely fragrant Casa Blanca lilies.

There are hostas, too, which Ms. Capiello says “are really just deer food.”

The shrubs add privacy screening along the property line, as well as color and structure. There are evergreens, including dwarf Scotch pine and a tough creeping juniper. A scattering of deciduous shrubs pumps up the color. A couple of spiraeas, the dwarf Little Princess and the golden-leaved Gold Mound both have raspberry pink flowers. A crape myrtle (Tonto) adds a pinkish red note in late summer. There are hydrangeas, too, and white-flowered viburnums, along with highbush blueberry and a crabapple tree.

At the end of the driveway, plants connect the garden to the house and invite further exploration. A climbing New Dawn rose scales a lattice screen on the front of the house, spilling over the railing of the upper deck in a cascade of pink blooms. A white clematis (Guernsey Cream) twines around a stair railing.

To avoid future flood damage, the house is raised, with storage and garage space underneath. In one of the little nooks is a gardener’s dream of a potting shed, a birthday present to Ms. Capiello from her husband. It holds a built-in potting bench and lots of shelving, with storage space for pots, tools, and other supplies.

The back of the house overlooks wetlands and Moriches Bay. The Capiellos have preserved their patch of wetland, not building a dock or keeping a boat there. As a result, according to Ms. Capiello, the wetlands grass has expanded from a small island to a large swath. Native mallows bloom along the edge of the wetlands all during June. Feeder fish attract egrets, and swans inhabit the area, too, providing year-round entertainment for the Capiellos and their guests.

The Capiellos have learned a great deal about the natural environment of the wetlands and beach, and they strive to nurture it on their property. They have embraced the native plants that have taken root on their own. “Nature has filled in a lot of the blank spots over the years,” Ms. Capiello said.

Two years ago, the Capiellos retired and moved to West Hampton Dunes full time. They joined the Barrier Beach Preservation Association, the West Hampton Dunes homeowners’ group whose mission is “to preserve and protect the beaches, bays, wetlands, and wildlife of West Hampton Dunes for the benefit of its citizens and visitors, and to promote respect for the coastal environment through public education and scientific research.”

The group takes its mission seriously. Each spring the members work with the state Department of Environmental Conservation and Cornell University’s Marine Cooperative Extension office to monitor horseshoe crabs on the beach during their mating season. With financial help from Southampton Town, they’ve developed an oyster and scallop farming program to replenish Moriches Bay, seeding the first sanctuary this spring with 20,000 shellfish. In August they have environmental programs for the children of residents. They work closely with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to protect endangered bird species, such as the piping plover, that are abundant on the barrier beach. This year they planted a demonstration garden of native plants with assistance from the Suffolk County Water Authority and Hampton Nursery.

These days, the Capiellos have more time to enjoy their garden, and to expand it.

“I have never seen a plant in a nursery that I didn’t like,” Ms. Capiello confessed. “Some women buy shoes—I buy plants!”

Some of those plants have thrived and some have died, but that is the nature of gardens. Ms. Capiello takes it all in stride. She is, she said, constantly moving plants around in the garden until she finds the spot where they grow well and look their best.

Their garden means a lot to Mark and Gina Capiello. It gives them privacy, which is important in the village, where the houses are close together.

“It’s fun to watch the garden grow, but after a raid by the deer we also know that it is a temporary joy that needs to be savored every day,” Ms. Capiello said.

The couple are grateful for having the time to enjoy their garden each day. Some days there’s even time for a glass of wine at sunset.

Patra's paradise

2008-07-18T05:03:00.000-07:00

Steve Whysall, Vancouver Sun
Published: Friday, July 18, 2008
Patra DeSilva thinks her roof garden overlooking the marina at Granville Island in downtown Vancouver looks magical, especially at night when strategically-placed lighting turns it into a veritable fairyland of colours and textures.

But the garden, which occupies 3,000 square feet on the terrace of DeSilva's two-bedroom condo, is an astonishing work of beauty any time of day.

And there is certainly something magical about the way you enter it. One minute you're walking along the featureless corridor of a typical apartment complex with its concrete walls and the sound of elevator doors closing behind you.

The next, you're stepping across a bed of pebbles through lush plantings of rosemary, salvia and fuchsias and through a woodland of dogwood, magnolia and maple trees.

The transition from boring apartment corridor to sumptuous garden oasis is astonishing. It makes you look back to see if it is really happening.

The transformation is reminiscent of the dramatic change of scenery in the story The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe when Lucy pushes through old fur coats and ends up in the glistening magical kingdom of Narnia. Once through the entrance, you come face to face with a mesmerizing spectacle -- more than 80 kinds of roses, from hybrid teas to floribundas, shrub to tree roses, in a sensational splash of colour.

Next you become aware of the large number of trees. DeSilva has planted a forest of choice specimens -- ginkgo, robinia, fig, mulberry, redbud, dogwood, Japanese maple, corkscrew willow, southern magnolia and maytree (Prunus padus).

She has even found a spot for the humungous empress tree (Paulownia tomentosum) and she is giving the tender blue fernleaf acacia (Acacia baileyana) a try.

In other places, large shrubs catch the eye. There's a mature French lilac (Syringa 'Charles Joly') and superb Crytomeria japonica 'Elegans' with its lovely golden foliage.

A big rhododendron provides spring colour around the same time all the white- and purple-flowered magnolias bloom. And the floriferous Hydrangea 'Endless Summer' pumps out blooms all summer while Sumac 'Tiger Eyes' offers great foliage interest as well as striking fall colour.

There all sorts of other visual treats including a yellow-flowering fremontodendron over a metal arch and a purple Osier willow billowing up into a cloud of frothy blue foliage.

The roof garden also has two ponds, one stocked with koi. They occupy opposite ends of the garden and are designed to create serenity and tranquility as well as provide "white noise" to mask traffic noise.

But it is the abundance and sheer flamboyance of all the roses that make the garden so breathtaking. All the plants are grouped together in well-defined colonies of containers to form distinct island beds of flower colour and foliage texture. Roses include 'Tuscan Sun', 'Voluptuous', 'Aroma Therapy', 'Sheila's Perfume', 'Margaret Merrill' and 'Lime Sublime.'

The exposure is ideal with an abundance of sunshine for the roses as well as gentle breezes for good air circulation.

Summer annuals such as calebrachoa, Cerinthe major, nicotiana, impatiens and lobelia have been dotted throughout as stand-alone features or to add flashes of colour under plants.

DeSilva cuts back all the floribundas and hybrid teas to about 30 cm every fall. The tree-roses (rose standards) are cut back to the main hub and the shrub roses are lightly trimmed.

None of the roses are wrapped for winter or moved into frost-free quarters. The only cold-treatment they get is a light layer of bark mulch to cover the crown of each rose.

In spring, DeSilva scrapes away a few inches of soil and replenishes it with SeaSoil, an enriched soil mix produced on Vancouver Island. She feeds the roses with fish fertilizer and Miracle Grow in summer.

Watering is a major commitment. It takes DeSilva 21/2 hours every day. "I like doing it. I find it very relaxing. And I have a method, so I have got it down to an art."

Despite the amazing number of plants on the rooftop, there is still plenty of space to walk around.

Close to the entrance, a dining area inside an elegant arbour has a canopy of rippling organza over it, giving the spot an inviting Mediterranean-villa vibe.

Other seating areas include a swing settee with brightly coloured cushions and a quaint metal tete-a-tete bench.

Decorative art work has been placed throughout the garden. There's glass art produced by a student of Portland glass artist Dale Chihuly and a leaping frog that spurts water into a pond. Elsewhere, plinths, columns, plaques and statues all style andstructural definition.

With unimpeded views of yachts moored in the marina at Granville Island and with the urban architecture of Burrard Bridge and highrises on the north side of False Creek, the roof garden is frequently used for dinner parties and soirees. DeSilva says it can accommodate 50 guests comfortably.

The garden spills over to other areas at the front and side -- DeSilva calls it her "outside 40" -- where lavender is grown in terracotta troughs and narrow borders are filled with trees, shrubs and perennials to give the main garden more privacy.

What about the weight of all these plants? DeSilva says engineers have checked and given the garden their okay, but she makes a point of using super-lightweight containers and always mixes her own soil to work in more pumice and fast-draining material to reduce weight.

The impact of the garden is all the more impressive when you realize it was only in 2004 that DeSilva and her husband, Barry, moved into the condo after selling up in West Vancouver.

"Some people say, 'What a lot of work', but I think of it as a labour of love. It gives me enormous pleasure," says DeSilva.

swhysall@png.canwest.com

QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

Q: Can you help with our persistent and pervasive problem of morning glory? After two years of hard work we have not managed to get rid of it. Roundup and Killex has no effect.

SW: You have my total sympathy. Morning glory (Calystegia sepia) is also known as blindweed and devil's gut.

It is truly a nightmare of a weed to eradicate. Studies have found its roots can go as deep as 20 feet, which is very disconcerting if you're considering re-digging an area.

Roundup is supposed to work. Killex is less effective. The recommended method is to take a plastic bag, tuck some of the vine into the bag, spray the leaves with Roundup, then tie the bag tightly.

Being systemic, Roundup is supposed to kill the weed within 10 days internally by disrupting its cell structure. However, it is banned as a pesticide in some areas, although is still available in various sizes at GardenWorks stores.

An organic approach -- the one I use, with mixed success -- is to continually cut the vine down to ground level the moment it raises its head.

By denying it light, you ultimately weaken its root system and it is supposed to die from lack of energy. You must also stop it flowering and cut it at the base to sap its strength and prevent it seeding.

Unfortunately, I have to say it frequently escapes my attention and manages to get a chokehold on a beautiful clematis in my garden.

It takes an enormous effort to detach it without hurting the clematis. If I pull at the bindweed indignantly, I end up pulling away great clematis flowers. Very frustrating.

I am told pigs are great at clearing ground of morning glory. They sift through the soil, eating the shoots until it is gone forever.

Q: What is eating the leaves of my roses? They have been chomped into almost perfect half circles or ovals. Does this damage the plant?

SW: This is the work of female leaf-cutter bees. These are solitary creatures that cut the leaves of roses and use the pieces to make little cells in the ground for their offsprings.

These bees like rose leaves, especially it seems, old-garden roses. The leaves are cut very efficiently. The slice is smooth with no ragged edges. Leaf-cutter bees do no serious harm to a rose bush. If you have them, it's a sign that the environment is working as it should. A few chomped leaves is no big deal. Next time, try to see if you can spot the bee at work. It's quite an interest spectacle.

ONLINE: Remember, you can download an In the Garden podcast by Steve Whysall from www.VancouverSun.com

This week, the Nitobe Garden at UBC is featured; it is the sixth episode in a series of tours of top gardens in Metro Vancouver.

ONLINE: See a photo gallery of Patra DeSilva's roof garden at VancouverSun.com

Baby-sit a beautiful butterfly this summer

2008-07-01T16:20:00.000-07:00

You can raise a caterpillar and watch the fascinating process of metamorphosis right at home, says Chris Lewis, education director at the Virginia Living Museum in Newport News. If you have parsley or fennel in your yard, you probably have black swallowtail caterpillars that eat plants in the parsley family (parsley, fennel and carrot leaves).

Materials

Black swallowtail caterpillar

Plastic "critter carrier" at least 10 inches tall, with a vented top (available at most pet supply stores)
8 oz clean plastic margarine tub with plastic lid filled with wet sand

A continuous supply of fresh caterpillar food (parsley or fennel leaves from the grocery store)

A stick the size of a pencil

Setting up the "nursery"

Make holes in the top of the margarine tub large enough for the stems of your caterpillar food plants to fit through. Put the top on the margarine container filled with wet sand and push the plant stems into the sand for support. Place the container with the food plants inside the critter carrier.

Gently pick up the caterpillar and place it on the food plant in the plastic tub. (When disturbed, a black swallowtail caterpillar may stick out two soft orange organs that contain a strong smelling but harmless substance.) Make sure the caterpillar is holding on to the leaves before you let go. Put the top on the critter carrier and place it in a warm, bright but shady place.

Caterpillars grow quickly and eat a lot so check the nursery every day. Replace the food with fresh leaves as often as necessary and clean out the caterpillar waste which looks like small dark pellets. As the caterpillar grows it will shed its skin (molt) several times. It only takes about 14 days from the day the egg hatches for the caterpillar to turn into a chrysalis.

The Big Change

Just before it changes into a chrysalis, the caterpillar will stop eating. When this happens, add the stick (at a slight angle) to the margarine container. The caterpillar will crawl up the stick, lean back, then spin a silk "belt" around its middle and a sticky pad for it's 'feet.' Next it will change into a brown chrysalis which will be supported by the silk. Once it turns into a chrysalis, you can carefully remove and discard the food plants. Try not to disturb the chrysalis.

In another 10 to14 days, the chrysalis will open and a new black swallowtail butterfly with small, wrinkled wings will emerge. Over the next few hours, the butterfly will pump fluid from its body into its wings to unfold them.

The next day, the butterfly will be ready to release. Take the critter carrier to a sunny sheltered spot and open the top If the butterfly doesn't fly away on its own, gently encourage it to step onto your finger then place it on an open flower in the garden.

Flower thief strikes three times

2008-06-26T05:11:00.000-07:00

Jamie Hall, edmontonjournal.com
Published: Wednesday, June 25
EDMONTON - Whoever stole Maria Berardi's flowers for the third year running would be well advised to go to ground and stay there.

As Berardi herself puts it: "I'm old but I'm still in good form. And I'm Italian; you don't want to make me mad, and, believe me, I'm mad."

Three years ago, when a thief excised all the flowers from the garden beds in front of her Mill Woods home, she was angry, but philosophical.

Last year, when it happened again, she was devastated.

This year, she called the police.

With any luck, they'll find the thief before she does.

"One time is one thing, but three times? Now it's personal," said Berardi.

Thanks to Const. Carol Weir, who delivered a floral donation from the Millcreek Nursery on Tuesday, and Berardi's daughter, who showed up with a trunkful of flowers, the beds are again a growing concern. Her children are also talking about installing a strategically placed security camera at the front of the house.

But the whole thing is still a mystery.

Every year, the flowers have been removed with surgical precision, the holes left behind perfectly formed yet dug deep enough to scoop out the plants' roots. Whoever committed this horticultural crime is likely the same person and needed tools, and the time to carry it out, seemingly with the intention of replanting.

If they did, they don't live nearby; Berardi has combed her entire neighbourhood twice over, standing on tiptoe to peer over fences into people's backyards.

"These aren't vandals doing this; if it was kids they would just pull them out and throw them away," said Berardi.

"Why would someone do this?"

Except for her exotic geraniums, the flowers, for the most part, were garden-variety annuals. Berardi intentionally purchased "cheap stuff" this year, worried the thief would strike again.

Maggie Easton, the president of the Edmonton Horticultural Society, is as puzzled as Berardi by the theft.

Childish pranks notwithstanding, this isn't something she's heard about from her members.

"Maybe it's someone who doesn't want to pay the money nurseries are charging these days for flowers," Easton said.

That's Kerri Buksa's guess, too, who said this sort of theft is quite common, committed by the same type of people who siphon gas from the tanks of cars.

"The bottom line is that some people just don't want to pay," said Buksa, who works for Greenland Garden Centre.

jhall@thejournal.canwest.com

Grand design

2008-06-22T06:40:00.000-07:00

Some gardens should be visited with friends: they are sociable places that invite picnics. Others, such as Herterton House on the fringes of the Northumberland Moors, should be sought out when you need peace, a place to sit and gather together your thoughts. Within the dry-stone walls that give shelter from the searing easterlies is a garden so tranquil that it has the feeling of a monastic cloister. I have been visiting Herterton for 15 years, and my trips have slowly revised what I now consider to be the point of a garden.

Herterton House was a ruined farm that had lain derelict for 17 years when artists Frank and Marjorie Lawley took it over in 1976 on a long lease from the National Trust. What’s now an acre of garden, subdivided into four distinct areas each with its own unique planting, was then a field of unforgiving Northumberland pasture. They set to work on the land inspired by their extensive reading of 17th-century herbals and gardening texts, especially that of the Yorkshire parson William Lawson who, in The Country Housewife’s Garden, advocated beauty, simplicity and harmony. Lawson would have recognised many of Herterton’s plants – gillyflowers, forget-me-nots, foxgloves – and its humanist philosophy.

The Front Garden is all clipped box and yew with low hedges, a place to see people strolling past in the lanes and to invite conversation. The Fancy Garden, with its clipped box parterre and stone gazebo, is for walking and thinking. In the Physic Garden, centred by its tighty clipped willowleaf pear and bordered by mounds of London Pride, it’s enough to sit and breathe in the scent of rose, thyme and artemisia. The Flower Garden, at its most flamboyant in July, echoes the colours of the lengthening day. Near the house is dawn – pink, white and yellow; in the middle are the vibrant colours of midday; and towards the rear of the garden, the purples and dark reds of sunset.

It has taken the Lawleys 32 years to create this masterpiece, and they have felt the heft of it. In the first days they built walls, dug out all the stones by hand and imported topsoil from the moors. They funded the garden by selling plants such as hardy geraniums, Jacob’s ladder, pulmonaria and astrantia – cottage-garden favourites that because of Northumberland’s cool summers continue to look fresh throughout the growing season.

In the early days of their research they’d visit the “high priestess” of cottage gardening, Marjorie Fish, at East Lambrook Manor. She had been married to the editor of the Daily Mail, Walter Fish, and wrote a classic book, We Made a Garden. As a dedicated plantswoman, she always carried a spade and a sack in the car in case she found good leaf mould, and Frank recalls how she collected old cottage garden plants that had been discarded during the Second World War in the Dig for Victory campaign. “She’d be driven around by her chauffeur, who doubled as the local butcher, and tour local country cottage gardens bellowing, ‘Stop!’, when an interesting primrose, euphorbia or hellebore caught her eye. She’d then negotiate with the owner and instruct her chauffeur to dig up a piece of the plant – usually with the starting handle of the elderly car.”

The Lawleys, realising that many cottage-garden favourites were in danger of dying out, adopted Fish’s plant-hunting technique – though without the help of a chauffeur – and have amassed an enviable collection of unusual varieties of plants. They favour simple flowers such as violets, campanulas, sea holly, astrantia and poppies and grow rare, double-formed varieties or those with an interesting leaf form. A treat before leaving Herterton is to visit the stock garden. Each day, those plants that have just reached their peak are dug up, wrapped in damp newspaper – Frank favours the broadsheets for their durability – and sold. Only the heartless could resist.

Seeing Herterton today, many visitors remark how fortunate Frank and Marjorie are to have had the opportunity to create this garden. The Lawleys are philosophical. “It was a calling,” they say. Like most artists, they are driven by their creative impulses, and roughened hands, worsening arthritis and a shortage of money throughout their lives testify to what a labour of love it has been. The sad thing is that, because they are tenants, they cannot be sure that after their deaths the garden will continue, with the National Trust unable to give an undertaking that it will be maintained as it is now. I urge all those who love gardens to visit Herterton soon.

Herterton is about 20 miles north of Morpeth in Northumberland, near the village of Cambo (01670 774278). It is open until September 30 on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays from 1.30pm until 5.30pm. It is also open under the National Gardens Scheme on July 17 and August 7 from 1.30pm until 5.30pm

Organic gardening: Growing roses

2008-06-13T05:23:00.000-07:00

If you like to garden organically, trying to grow healthy roses is a nightmare. If they succumb to blackspot, for instance, you can't reach for the chemicals. As a result, I've grown many different roses for periods of two years or so before abandoning them to disease. This trial-and-error process has shown which roses are strong and healthy; these days I tend to grow trouble-free rugosas, gallicas and many small-flowered ramblers instead of modern, repeat-flowering varieties.

A couple of years ago I stumbled upon the British Association of Rose Breeders (BARB) Rose Trials held at Pencoed College near Bridgend. The small team does not have time to spray the roses as well as judge their performance, so a true picture of each rose's constitution emerges - making the trial unique in Britain.

Ivor Mace (the trials supervisor) and other judges noticed that roses bred by German nursery Kordes stayed healthy while others around them floundered in the damp climate of South Wales.

The health and vigour of Kordes roses isn't a fluke. This company stopped spraying their own rose beds in 1976 because eco-minded young German gardeners had virtually written off the rose as ungrowable. Initially whole fields of roses went down with disease. The few healthy specimens were selected to form the basis of a new breeding programme and within 10 years, Kordes had bred a range of healthy, modern roses. They were sold in Britain by Mattocks Roses, then part of Notcutts.

Following the Pencoed trials, I started growing Kordes roses in my own garden. The star performer has been Champagne Moments, a soft apricot floribunda (flowering June-Oct; see no27, right). I surrounded these with sultry late-flowering penstemons ('Blackbird', 'Purple Bedder' and 'Bredon') and added cream peonies (Paeonia lactiflora 'Duchesse de Nemours'). There has been no hint of disease, even in 2007's damp, disease-ridden summer. It proves that some roses can perform well au naturel - just as well, because roses that need chemical props are no good to green gardeners.

TOP PERFORMING PLANTS ARE HONORED AT ANNUAL COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY FLOWER TRIALS

2008-06-03T16:45:00.000-07:00

Note to Editors: Top performing varieties at the Annual Flower Trial Gardens for the 2007 growing season and evaluators' comments on all varieties are available at www.flowertrials.colostate.edu. Selected high resolution images are available by visiting www.newsinfo.colostate.edu and clicking on the headline for this release.

FORT COLLINS - Colorado's varied climate presents challenges to flower gardeners. Summer heat, inconsistent moisture, drying winds and severe weather can all play havoc on flowers. To assist both homeowners and commercial operators, Colorado State University has released the results of its annual Flower Trials Garden Performance Report.

Thousand of flower varieties from geraniums to dahlia's to petunias were planted in summer 2007 at the Flower Trial Gardens, 1401 Remington St. in Fort Collins. Judges tracked the progress, paying close attention to vividness of colors, number of blossoms and heights of the plants. The judges, who included horticulture industry representatives, Colorado State experts and Extension master gardeners, then selected the healthiest and most vibrant of each type of flower.

Best of Show was Cleome "Spirit Appleblossom" from Proven Winners seed company. Judges noted that the plant's delicate white and pink flowers bloomed throughout the summer and that it stood out from a distance in the garden. Best New Variety for 2007 was Dahlia "Mystic Illusion" from Proven Selections by Proven Winners, with its striking combination of bright yellow flowers against dark purple foliage.

For a full list of winners, visit www.flowertrials.colostate.edu.

Twenty-two seed and vegetable companies from around the United States and the world participated in the trials. The Annual Trial Gardens program is directed by Jim Klett, professor in Department of Horticulture and Landscape Architecture at Colorado State.

"The main purpose of this is the evaluation of annual flowers to see how well they perform in Colorado's high light intensity and low humidity," said Klett, who runs the largest flower test garden in the state and one of the five largest in the United States.

Most of the winning plants are available at local nurseries or garden centers for this growing season.

'Floating garden' wins best in show at Chelsea

2008-05-20T05:48:00.000-07:00

A garden designed to give the appearance of plants floating in mid air has won top honours at the Chelsea Flower Show.

Judges today awarded the Laurent-Perrier Garden designed by Tom Stuart-Smith a gold medal and the prestigious title of best in show.

The garden is described as "a contemplative space with a dreamy, slightly surreal character" and features a grove of hornbeams pruned into "rounded clouds".

A number of zinc tanks appearing to overflow are dotted throughout the garden, with planting based around form and texture rather than colour.

The best in show award is the third for Mr Stuart-Smith and brings his tally of Chelsea golds to seven.

He said today: "A lot of people go into making a garden like this so you feel a lot of responsibility. It's fantastic.

"I wanted to show that a garden doesn't have to be firing on all cylinders and be a blaze of colour and full of gimmicks. This is a garden that is quite serene and subdued."

Thousands of gardening fans descended on the sell-out world famous show when it opened its doors to the public today.

Set over 11 acres, home-grown exhibits are joined by exotic flowers and displays from Jamaica to Australia.

The London event also features gardens designed with particular people in mind including children, the elderly, those with limited space - and even stargazers.

The show was given the Royal seal of approval yesterday when the Queen visited.

She stopped to admire a garden designed in memory of former Beatle George Harrison, which tells the story of the keen gardener's life, and spent several minutes chatting to his widow Olivia.

She also met Yvonne Innes, who designed From Life To Life, A Garden for George.

Ringo Starr and Sir George Martin gave the garden the thumbs up during a trip to the show yesterday.

A host of celebrities - including actors, sports stars and television presenters - also enjoyed a preview of the show's highlights.

Now in its 86th year, some 157,000 people will visit the event, which is organised by the Royal Horticultural Society and runs until Saturday.

Nearly 400 new plants have been launched at the show in the past six years, with many more being added to the list this year.

During show week, 5,000 bottles of champagne, 49,000 glasses of Pimms, 54,000 cups of tea and coffee and 28,000 sandwiches will be sold at the site.

A niche takes root

2008-05-05T04:21:00.001-07:00

Gina Teel, Calgary Herald
Published: Monday, May 05, 2008
Like most aspects of life in Calgary these days, gardening has become a hepped up leisure activity that's allotted only so much time in the weekly schedule.

Edward's Garden Centre caters to busy gardeners who know what they want and, perhaps more importantly, what they don't want -- long lineups at the till, having to walk a mile in a big box store to get plants, and ordinary greenery that everybody and their dog has.

"Gardening is supposed to be relaxing. Do you want to be waiting in line with some guy with a bunch of two-by-fours in front of you?," asked Ted Childs, owner of Edward's Garden Centre.

A specialty garden business, Edward's has found its niche in giving the discerning gardener something different.

Hardcore gardeners want to set their yard apart, or make a personal statement, be it through using unusual plants, specific colours of flowers, pots, planters, rock or statuary.

For instance, Edward's carries an Oak Leaf Mountain Ash instead of the common Mountain Ash, just to be different.

There are a Gemini apple trees, bred to produce a small number of large crisp apples for fresh eating and not storage.

"People want to walk out on Sunday morning with their cup of coffee or latte and pick an apple and life is good. They don't want to have a whole yard full of this stuff that they feel they have to harvest," Childs said.

Container gardens are hugely popular, as are rock gardens built with tufa rock and planted with specific dwarf native alpine plants.

His quality selection caters to time-pressed but sage gardeners, but Childs said that doesn't mean he's into fads.

He does, however, work with local gardeners to see what plants work best in Calgary.

Childs also brings in what his customers ask for -- as a result, new this year are water plants and starter koi.

Generally, people want fewer trees and more shrubs that have different foliage and for fall colour consideration.

Customers want a mix of perennials in there, too, to ensure a multi-seasonal punch of colour.

They'll make room for some fruit trees, like Evans cherry, which produces large, edible sour cherries, and apple varieties, such as Gemini.

On the flower side, there are super petunias, which are longer-blooming and more productive than the common variety and don't require deadheading.

There are several different kinds of echinacea -- a favourite for attracting butterflies -- including Coconut Lime, the first double-flowered, white echinacea, and Big Sky Sunset with its florid blooms.

Queeny Purple, the first purple hollyhock, is on offer, as are purple gas plant, sneezeweed, Japanese toad lily, liver leaf, cushion spurge and a tree peony that promises spectacular blooms. That's just a small sampling of what's on hand.

Edward's grows some of its own perennials at its unique cliffside location in the city's northwest. The business also grows its own annuals, but that's accomplished in a 30,000-square-foot greenhouse in Sundre, about 130 kilometres northwest of Calgary.

Childs bought the Sundre property two years ago for cost and quality control reasons, and to grow the more unusual annuals he couldn't get from his former supplier. It also allows him to grow larger plants for containers, which is what his customers prefer.

Warm up to preparations for summer's bounty

2008-05-03T05:42:00.000-07:00

Spring gardens are beginning to mature very nicely now, but this doesn't mean you can sit back and pat yourself on the back over your accomplishments. No, May is still a time of much activity between the plant rows.

It's gladioli planting time. The best location for these bulbs is in a well-drained location protected from the wind. If the rains don't come, water weekly after the spikes pop out of the ground. Heat-seeking cannas, caladiums and dahlias can also be planted now.
If you want stronger, bushier plants with more flower power, prepare to give them a pinch. Pinching back encourages branching and more compact growth. This is especially true for such popular ornamentals as petunias, annual salvias and zinnias. The herb basil also benefits from being pinched back.
If your azaleas, gardenias, hydrangeas, magnolias and rhododendrons have begun to look sickly with yellow leaves streaked by green veins, this could be a sign of iron chlorosis. A light application of Epsom salt around the base of each plant is the cure.
A mini-garden for apartment or condo dwellers is possible with a bale of hay. Just locate it in a sunny area, poke holes in the top and sides of the bale, put plants in the holes with a little bit of dirt, and water regularly (add water-soluble fertilizer occasionally). Don't overcrowd plants.
We have had a long winter and a cool spring, so if you have waited to begin your summer vegetable garden until now, you are one smart gardener. With the temperatures finally up, it is time to get those veggies into the ground. Fill your beds with such delectable delights as tomatoes, beans, peppers, okra, squash, cucumbers, eggplant and watermelons.
When planting tomato transplants, take advantage of the warm soil close to the surface (which induces root growth) by planting the tomatoes in trenches rather than in deep holes. For an even stronger root system, bury all but the upper 3 inches of each plant.
The temperature has warmed up enough to bring houseplants out for a summer vacation. Just be sure to locate them in areas that receive filtered shade most of the day to prevent sunscald.
Don't forget to clean the birdbath and refill it with fresh water at least once a week.

All rights reserved. This copyrighted material may not be published, broadcast or redistributed in any manner.
Want to ask L.A. Jackson a question about your garden? Go to his Web site at: southeastgardeningwithla.com.

Garden Photography

2008-04-27T05:46:00.001-07:00

This month the Star Performer in the garden is the ubiquitous tulip. I bet we buy more cut tulips in the spring than any other flower. They make a nice table centerpiece.

These photos were taken exclusively from Van Lierop Bulb Farm. Their show garden and gift shop is located in Puyallup. Staff kindly waited beyond their closing time while I photographed in the fading afternoon light. Much thanks.

In the first shot, the Muscari blossoms provided an anchor for the viewer to appreciate the shapes and colors of the tulips.

Turks revive glory of tulips

2008-04-25T06:43:00.000-07:00

ISTANBUL - It's not the minarets, the sunsets or the Bosphorous views making Istanbul's April crowds coo with pleasure - it is the tulips.

With a tulip blooming for almost every one of its 12 million inhabitants the city hopes to remind the world that Turkey was the original home of the flower now more usually associated with clogs, cheese and windmills.

"Istanbul was a city without flowers, now the tulip has returned," Istanbul Mayor Kadir Topbas said, speaking by a steep bank blanketed by rich red-orange blooms, the result of a massive bulb-planting program which began three years ago.

"People are hugely excited by them."

Tulips hail originally from eastern Turkey and the steppe of central Asia and were cultivated by the Ottomans, who took the flower to their imperial capital Istanbul, where they adorned the Sultan's palaces and the gardens of the elite. The word "tulip" derives from the Turkish word tulbent, referring to the Sultan's turban headdress, which the flower resembled in shape.

An angry mob uprising in the eighteenth century saw Istanbul's opulent tulip gardens all but disappear, and the city had been largely without beds of the flower ever since.

Today tulips line the Sea of Marmara coast, protrude from concrete islands amid Istanbul's notoriously heavy traffic and nestle in colourful clusters by the city's key tourist sights.

"Tulips were with us for thousands of years... but unfortunately this had become somewhat forgotten," said Topbas, a member of Turkey's ruling AK Party.

He hopes the brief period during which the flowers are in bloom will stir memories of their place in Turkish culture.

Besides the bulb planting, a nine-day tulip festival, and a photo exhibition of the 100 most beautiful tulips in the city's busiest square, Istanbul council has begun agricultural tulip production and hopes it will develop as an industry.

"The Netherlands of course has a powerful tulip and bulb industry... but I hope we can also one day become a tulip exporter," said Topbas.

Istanbul's fledgling tulip business employs about 5-10,000 people, but Topbas thinks it could one day generate up to 230,000 jobs in and around the city where official unemployment in 2006 stood at 11.2 per cent.

"I'm sure we could beat the Dutch with our tulips," smiled 40-year-old Melek Polot, out visiting a flower display on the banks of the Bosphorous.

"The tulips are the most beautiful thing in Istanbul."

If it takes off, the Turkish venture would be claiming a slice of a big business. Exports of cut flowers, bulbs and plants from the Netherlands, the world's biggest flower exporter, amounted to 6.6 billion euros ($A11.13 billion) in 2007 according to the Dutch Agricultural Wholesale Board.

The tulip fields also draw thousands of tourists each year, allowing the Dutch economy to profit from the flower which nearly bankrupted it 400 years ago.

The first tulips were taken back to Europe, including the Netherlands, in the 1550s by an ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. One Dutchman, confused by the gift of a tulip bulb, is said to have fried it and eaten it like an onion.

Within a few decades a frenzy for the flower had taken hold which came close to choking the Dutch economy, as merchants began to pay ludicrously elevated prices for bulbs.

At the height of the craze - around 1635 to 1637 - a single tulip bulb of one of the exotic varieties cost more than a smart Amsterdam canal-side house. Inevitably the bubble burst and traders were left with virtually worthless bulbs and crippling debts.

Tulips were a favourite motif of Ottoman artists and craftsmen. Elongated red tulips, whose petals end in a sharp point, feature in classical ceramic blue tiles, and the flower, known as "lale" in Turkish, was depicted on carpets.

"If you write the name lale in Arabic letters it looks very much like the word Allah so they say it is a kind of divine flower," said Ilber Ortayli, director of Istanbul's Topkapi palace, from where the Sultans ruled over an empire stretching from the Balkans to Egypt.

Although the Ottomans never succumbed to Europe's irrational excitement, Ortayli thinks they would have had much sympathy.

"Every kind of madness is worth it for the tulip because it is a very attractive flower. Even I sometimes buy hundreds of them and bring them home. It is worse than alcoholism."

Istanbul council says it has spent 2.7 million Turkish lira ($A2.18 million) on the tulips and the tulip festival. Some would have preferred to see it spent elsewhere.

"The tulips are beautiful but they only last for such a short time," said 55-year-old taxi driver Ismail Avcilar. "It would have been better to spend the money on infrastructure."

Frequent traffic jams often make navigating the city's streets frustrating.

But others are proud.

Lale Atik, 59, whose name means tulip, said she understood why the world had forgotten the flower's Turkish origin.

"The Dutch imported Tulip bulbs, cultivated them and developed new types while we just sat on our hands... but now we can create the old days of Istanbul," she said.

The tulip even gave its name to a relatively peaceful and prosperous era of Ottoman history under Sultan Ahmet III in the early eighteenth century, when diplomacy and cultural exchange with the West took precedence over wars and expansion.

Ahmet loved garden parties and splashing out on tulips. Legend has it that at one such evening party tortoises with little lanterns attached to their shells meandered slowly through the flowers.

An uprising brought an end to such indulgence, as well as to Ahmet's reign, and the gardens lining the Bosphorous were destroyed in the process.

"The municipality of Istanbul has recreated these type of tulip gardens as well as here in our palace," said Ortayli.

Reuters

Pill Bug's Point of View: Finding Delight in an Artist's Garden

2008-04-24T05:40:00.000-07:00

Interesting Tulips
How wonderful to have parrot tulips growing in my garden! They are so much more interesting than the mechanically perfect shapes and colors of regular tulips. I have been using the word "interesting" a lot lately to express pleasure and the word "boring" to express my displeasure. I am drawn to interesting plants and interesting and complex people. I know that the beautiful contortions of the parrot tulips are caused by a virus and can be considered deformities. Hmmm. Do our own struggles and emotional deformities make us more beautiful, more interesting people? Of course they do!

Stone Harbor Garden Club growing

2008-04-23T05:13:00.000-07:00

STONE HARBOR - The Stone Harbor Garden Club is celebrating its 30th anniversary of fellowship and community service. The club was founded in 1978 by a small group of women who met at the home of Nancy Ritchie. It now has 187 members and is growing each year. Fifty to 60 come regularly to club meetings held at 10 a.m. the second Monday of each month at St. Paul's Catholic Church at 96th Street and Third Avenue during April and May. The club will host a luncheon in June at the Wetlands Institute.
The club meets normally at the Women's Civic Club, but it is under renovation. At each meeting there are speakers and a hands-on program. Joan Kramar has been president of the club for the past three years, and wants people to know the passion the group shares for the club as well as community service.

"Our club works well together and we maintain 44 islands in Stone Harbor, the Water Works, bridge tender, Remembrance Garden (at 122nd Street), the 96th Street tennis courts, plantings at the 96th Street Golden Gate and Sunset Drive, along with 117th Street," Kramar said. "We also planted in front of the Chamber of Commerce, and this year are going to put hanging baskets along 96th Street with the support of the borough and the Realty Owners Associaton, or ROA. Everyone in the club is committed to volunteering and spending time keeping our town beautiful."

The club also holds a flower show every two years that is open to the public and plants a tree on Arbor Day at the Elementary School. It also holds a Garden Walk every two years for members, an annual House Tour, Plant and Bake Sale and Community Yard Sale, which helps them raise funds for beautification efforts.

The club was invited in 2006 to be in the Philadelphia Flower Show, where it placed third.

Counting (as well as counting on) bees

2008-04-13T17:25:00.000-07:00

By Reeser Manley
Saturday, April 12, 2008 - Bangor Daily News

Spring has come to Marjorie’s garden. The snow line has retreated to the shady edges. Red elder buds have parted purple scales sufficient to glimpse the clustered lime-green flower buds. A fox sparrow scratches under the feeder while chickadees flit among the upper branches of the pin cherry, nipping at swelling buds. Somewhere nearby the cardinal sings.

Soon there will be bees, the moment there are flowers to forage. Marjorie and I plan to participate in a nationwide summer census, counting the bees that visit the garden’s sunflowers.

The Great Sunflower Project is looking for citizen scientists all over the United States to plant sunflowers and then observe how many and what kinds of bees forage on them. It is asking each participant to observe for 30 minutes twice a month and record the results on the Internet. It is looking for observers of any age in urban, suburban and rural environments.

When all the data are in, project scientists will use them to make a coast-to-coast pollination map, showing where bees are and are not throughout the U.S. Project leader Gretchen LeBuhn, biologist at San Francisco State University, is particularly interested in the role of urban gardens in maintaining suitable habitats for pollinators. "We know that pollinators are declining in certain wild and many agricultural landscapes," says LeBuhn. "We do not know much about how healthy bee populations are maintained in an urban environment. Because natural habitats are uncommon in urban landscapes, they may not provide enough resources to support viable pollinator communities. However, if other habitats, such as urban gardens and restored areas, are sufficiently connected to natural habitat, then native populations may thrive."

At the project Web site, www.greatsunflower.org, you can find detailed information on how to grow sunflowers and how to count the bees. One important aspect of the project is having every participant growing the same type of sunflower, the wild sunflower, Helianthus annuus. Once you register for the project, you will be sent seeds, or you can provide your own.

Twice a month, between 10 a.m. and noon on a designated Saturday or Sunday, Marjorie and I will take our coffee to the garden. We will record the temperature and then settle into a spot within sight of our sunflowers but not so near as to scare the bees. Focusing on one sunflower, we will count and record the number of open flowers. Then we will wait patiently for visitors, recording how long it takes for the first five bees to visit the flower.

Part of the fun will be trying to identify each bee, not to species level, of course, but by type, such as honeybee, bumblebee, or other native bee. Given the prevalence of colony collapse disorder in honeybees and the knowledge that bumblebees are struggling to find suitable habitat, project leaders are especially interested in getting information on those groups.

I noticed with a twinge of jealousy that project participants in Georgia and Southern California are already entering data on bee visits, and have been for some time now, while here it is still too early to plant the sunflowers! But my time will come, summer mornings sitting next to Marjorie in her garden, drinking coffee and counting bees.

Flower village with exquisite blooms

2008-03-09T17:32:00.000-07:00

VietNamNet Bridge - Van Thanh is one of the six flower villages in the Central Highland tourist resort city of Da Lat. The application of technological advances to farming has helped farmers keep flowers in bloom during festive occasions such as Valentine’s Day and International Women’s Day.

We arrived in the highland city on a sunny and dry day. Along the asphalted road winding around the sloppy hill to Van Thanh village are semi-detached houses and a smattering of luxury villas built in the middle of flowerbeds of roses.

We dropped in at house No75A where a truck was loaded with fresh flowers.

“We pick up and transport flowers from gardens to homes where we sort out small ones for local sales and big ones for sales in neighbouring localities such as Qui Nhon, Tuy Hoa and Nha Trang,” said house owner Nguyen Thi Tuyet. “To prepare for International Women’s Day (March 8), we have planned in advance to meet customer demand. Over the past few days, we have cancelled lots of orders because we do not have adequate flowers for supply.”

Next to the Tuyet’s is Trung Dung florist wholesale agent. We noticed that wholesaler Nguyen Thi Bich Dung was busy answering phone calls from dealers. She said tens of thousands of roses are transported from her agent to localities across the country at high prices on big celebrations such as Valentine Day (February 14) and International Women’s Day (March 8).

“Dealers from Hanoi often place orders and come here earlier than those from Saigon and Nha Trang city,” said Dung. “They select all the varieties such as carnations, Bibis, Salems and roses of different colours. When the celebration draws near, prices vary day by day…… All the villagers here grow roses, but there are only three or four wholesalers like me.”

It is said that the village used to grow vegetables only. In the late 1950s, several farmers brought home and planted some varieties of roses on a trial basis. Surprisingly this species of flower rapidly adapted to the climate and soil conditions in the Central Highlands, and since then local farmers have shifted to planting roses. Time flies and they have crossbred new varieties, using advanced technology from the Netherlands, Taiwan and Japan. Currently, more than 150ha of flowers, with two thirds dedicated to roses, are grown in the greenhouse equipped with automatic lighting and watering systems.

Flower farming has been handed down from generation to generation. Young farmers are now aware of the importance of maintaining and developing this practice.

“Our family has developed this rose garden for seven years and we have gained experience year by year. This farming practice requires perseverance,” said Nguyen Van Chinh, another farmer in Van Thanh village. “Rose prices have kept increasing since the traditional lunar New Year (Tet) festival. As far as I know, Hanoi will be running short of roses because of the cold weather this year. Therefore I have been trying to meet large orders of roses for Valentine’s Day (February 14) and International Women’s Day (March 8).”

Chairman of the Ward No5 Farmers Association Nguyen Duc Hoc told us, “In many places it will be a success story if farmers earn VND50 million/ha. Here in Van Thanh, many farmers get between VND300-500 million/ha or even VND700-800 million/ha. Many of them have built villas and bought cars.”

According to Mr Hoa, planting roses by applying high technology in Van Thanh is the most efficient business model in Da Lat. Advanced technology can help flowers bloom on the right day and be kept longer. Therefore, flower prices there are higher than in other places.

Women hold half the sky. Besides gifts from their men, flowers are indispensable to them on International Women’s Day. Farmers in Van Thanh flower village are very proud because their flowers are a spiritually invaluable gift to women on March 8.

In the garden

2008-03-07T16:12:00.000-08:00

Rosa Steppanova

SOME gardening dilemmas solve themselves as the seasons change while others become bigger and bigger headaches as time passes.

Aralia cashmeriana is one of those larger than life herbaceous perennials that are, because of their magnificent proportions, often classed as shrubs. It has huge fingered leaves on stout stalks that, from a slow start at the end of April, rapidly grow into a perfect green dome, decked by white lace-cap flowers in the autumn.

Not long after that the whole thing collapses into a large grey sprawl. The leaves disintegrate while the stems, held together by bundles of strong parallel fibres, hang around forever - if one lets them.

While the plant is in full leaf all vegetation beneath it is killed off by a lack of light, which leaves a sizeable patch of bare soil for near on five months every year. When planting it next to an old lamb house, where it towers impressively all summer, I hadn't taken this into account.

Lonicera pileata, the Chinese shrubby honeysuckle, Hedera helix 'Hibernica', a vigorous, dark-leaved ivy, even the handsome but dreadfully invasive Lamium galeobdolon, all featured, at one time or another, on my list of suitably shade-tolerant carpeters, and all were dismissed as unsuitable. The former, growing in dense shade, would look like a plucked chicken at the end of the growing season, while the other two are far too invasive for the space available.

But that bare spot wouldn't let me rest, and during the brief fine spell last month I gathered up several trays of mini daffs and a deep purple cultivar of Crocus tommasinianus to plant around the aralia's root stock. It was no use. The yellow and purple against brown soil made my stomach lurch and the bulbs sat there, in their trays, until Mothers' Day.

And here, dear reader, you are about to become party to a shameful secret. For the past five or six years I have been a member of the SSSTC or Shetland Seasonal Shrinking Trouser Club, to give it its full name. It is shameful because these days none of us with a single ounce of self-respect or self-discipline are allowed to let our trousers shrink - even just a little.

As March came in like the proverbial lion last Saturday, it witnessed Lea Gardens' return to form after a long winter break. The effort (many hands make light work) continued the following day and we literally managed to move, if not mountains, then the next best thing: two impressive lengths of greenheart, one of the heaviest and hardest woods on the planet, culled from the Guyanan Chlorocardium tree. Originally used as part of a pier, then rescued from death by landfill, they are now destined to hold back the soil in a terraced bank.

There was just one problem: how to get them from one side of the garden to the other. Half an hour later, and with the help of four human beings, two lengths of rope, one wheelbarrow, and one sack trolley, they were positioned precisely where I wanted them. And that was only the start. It never ceases to amaze me what can be achieved in a day or two with a few extra shoulders to the wheel.

Roses were pruned, plantings enlarged, mature shrubs moved, willows coppiced, rotting wooden structures replaced by new, rubbish gathered and bagged, horse manure spread. I could go on.

Rather than exhausting, I have always found hard physical work enjoyable and greatly energizing. But in order for it to be enjoyable, it must serve a purpose. With the best will in the world, I can't see myself running on a treadmill, I want tangible results. My labours need to bear fruit.

That first real working weekend certainly did, and also made me realise just how much exercise the gardens gives me, and how comparatively little I get during the winter. This, I'm sure, holds true for most Shetland gardeners. Physical exertion is always followed, and sometimes accompanied, by increased cerebral dexterity. Problems simply solve themselves, as one garden job leads to another.

March is usually classed as too early for pruning roses but who cares when the sun shines and the sky is blue, even if this day between weathers is followed by a blizzard or two?

Rosa 'Bourbon Queen' is a martyr to black spot and has already enjoyed one stay of execution. A hard pruning, followed by a thick mulch above her roots did the trick for two or three years but now the disease has come back with a vengeance. The queen, a shrub rose rather than a climber or rambler, is a formidable creature that has reached out, from her well over two metres high byre wall, onto the roof and into the hayloft.

With plants taking such a long time to grow to a reasonable size, it always strikes me as such a shame to cut them back really hard, but in this case it is a final chance. If we get a reasonable summer, there might even be the chance of a few late flowers, large, heavy, pink, and sweetly scented

At the base of the rose a few single snowdrop bulbs had thickened into sizeable clumps. They were in full flower but in the way of the black-spot smothering horse manure mulch.

As soon as I had lifted them they presented me with the cure for the problem mentioned above. From now on I'll turn a blind eye to the bald patch in question, then, from January onwards I shall enjoy it as the snowdrops expand and start to cover all bare soil. I might even add some of those purple crocuses for good measure.

If you're a member of the SSSTC, don't let it get you down. We all need a little additional girth to keep us warm during the winter. As spring approaches and you spend more and more time pottering about in your garden you'll find, just as I have done, that your shrunk trousers start to magically expand once more.

* The black and white cat we'd taken to be Mr. Gentleman turned out to be a much older animal, wearing a somewhat moth-eaten coat. Despite his advanced years he looked regal, was well fed and well groomed but had obviously fallen on hard times.

By now we were surrounded by several dozen cats, all politely begging - Italian cats are very well behaved - for a morsel of Parma ham. But there's no such thing as a free snack, even for street-wise felines.

James pulled a photograph from the breast pocket of his trench coat and, showing the portrait of Mr. Gentleman to the assembled cats, asked if they had seen him. All but one shook their heads. A young ginger female with a tail like an apricot feather boa said she'd not long arrived from the Grosetto cat community, and recalled seeing a cat rather like him. We gave everybody a sliver of ham, whished them all a happy new year ( bon anno), and good luck (tante augurie), then headed into the night, south, towards Grosetto.

Our hopes were dashed as soon as we arrived shortly after midnight. Amongst the gatti randagi of the province was none that even remotely resembled Mr. G but, pinned just below the cat community board was a drawing of somebody who looked strangely familiar. The cruel curl of those thin lips, the small and sharply pointed teeth were unmistakable. Underneath the hastily sketched but accurate portrait of High Maintenance Husband the following warning had been scratched in strong, bold claw marks: "Beware this human, he is a prominent member of an international cat-to-fur-rugs ring. Never accept food offered by him."

And here, dear reader, on this very cliff, we have to leave the story hanging for the time being.

Buckwheat, our long-flowering native

2008-03-05T16:33:00.000-08:00

The hardy Californian delivers pink-red blooms from late summer to winter.
By Emily Green, Special to The Times
March 6, 2008
LAST summer, a chef friend stood admiring the edge of my herb garden, joking that the blaze of color from the red-flowering buckwheat planted along the border was far too pretty to harvest for pancake flour.

In truth, I had no intention of grinding up the blossoms. It seemed incredible that even the most avid Russian blini maker ever had the patience to mill and sift the tiny flowers, which truth be told are not really red, but an intense dirty pink. Crush the flowers in your fingers and the seeds are so small, you can barely see them. You'd need an acre to produce a canapé.

It took native plants man Bart O'Brien to set me straight -- once he had stopped laughing -- that cooking buckwheat comes from another genus of plants, Asian in origin, called Fagopyrum. Our native American western buckwheats come from the genus Eriogonum, pronounced "air-ee-og-oh-num," and my floating and delicate red-flowering buckwheat is a species with the oddly aristocratic name E. grande rubescens.

So much for culinary references. Yet I couldn't rip this California native from my herb garden. No plant looks better planted in the foreground of dill and fennel, which also have spiring flowers. Moreover, long after dill is done and fennel quits in late summer, showing the limits of some immigrant plants in their adopted land, the native buckwheat is still flowering.

The blooms start in midsummer, and by late February the splodge of strangely lustrous pink, visible through the watery gray light of a winter rain, will be that last cluster of buckwheat flowers, held stubbornly aloft on delicate and kookily architectural stems.

Singling out buckwheat as a Californian representative in this section otherwise devoted to competitors from other countries with similar climates is probably odd. Red-flowering buckwheat is an unlikely Miss California for every possible reason, starting with the fact that few plants are uglier as seedlings. Volunteer seedlings or specimens in 1-gallon pots from nurseries start out looking straggly and sad, like droopy cabbages that have bolted.

The plant caught the interest of Central Coast nurseryman David Fross, who began propagating it for his Native Sons nursery in Arroyo Grande, and found it to be an acquired taste sought after by landscapers and botanic gardens.

He tried to breed plants with the darkest flowers, but he found the plant's "most endearing habit" was the way it bred on its own.

Buckwheat likes sun but can take some shade. Fross recommends it for dry meadows, perennial borders, containers, banks and rock gardens. Give it a year, and the gawky seedling will have grown into a neat mound, about 18 inches across and a foot high.

Even out of flower, it makes a first-class ground cover. The leaves are a deep green with a slight aspect of a silvery wash and felted white undersides. You get all the color hit of ivy without the invasive problem or snails.

Come mid-to-late summer, just as the spring flowering plants are punking out, the sturdiness of a good green background plant gives way to a far dreamier impression as scaffold-like flower stems start rising. The stems alone are something to behold, with a cantilevered quality as if drawn by a ruler. They give the plants a funny, graceful and oddly human aspect, less like a stem out of nature and more like a Buckminster Fuller design for a stem.

Be warned. One buckwheat is never enough. As it begins to flower, casting a pink cloud over the deep green base of foliage, you'll want a field of them, a wheat plant or not.

Then the final surprise is that this is indeed a food plant -- just not for humans. It's of infinite importance to native bees and butterflies. Above all, buckwheat may be the refuge and rescuer for our pollinators. For half the year, from late summer to the darkest days of winter, these stubborn pink flowers provide forage for creatures when the rest of the garden prima donnas are waiting for the optimum moments of spring.

Buckwheat's native ranges are the Channel Islands, whose mixture of intense heat and fog equip it perfectly to survive mainland garden conditions of intense heat and irrigation. But don't over-water the plants. They don't need it. They're real Californians.

Top 100 plants: Winter

2008-02-14T17:00:00.000-08:00

1 Prunus x subhirtella 'Autumnalis'
Perfectly formed, frilled pale pink blossom sprinkle through dark, bare tracery of branches for weeks of subtle flower from November until February. Easy to grow (7.5m/25ft).

2 Sarcococca confusa
Dark green, glossy foliage that looks handsome all year, with fragrant ivory flowers followed by black berries. Elegant and perfect for containers. Likes moisture (1.5m/5ft).

3 Clematis cirrhosa var. balearica
Dark, ferny foliage highlights a profusion of pendent, pale cream bells spotted in maroon. A saviour for early bees. Do not prune! South-facing wall (3m/10ft).

4 Daphne bholua 'Jacqueline Postill'
Scented clusters of waxy pink flowers and lavish foliage. Flowers in January. Good soil, warm position (3m/10ft).

5 Eranthis hyemalis
The winter aconite only opens its bright yellow globes in warm sunshine. Perfect under a tree or on a grassy bank (6cm/2in).

6 Helleborus x ericsmithii
Silver-washed, serrated foliage and white saucers on strong stems begin in midwinter before fading to rose pink. Part shade (30cm/12in).

7 Betula utilis var. jacquemontii 'Grayswood Ghost'
A charcoal study with striking, silk-textured, white bark and slate-black twigs. Good yellow leaves in autumn. Easy (18m/60ft).

8 Mahonia x media 'Winter Sun'
Radiating crowns of lemon yellow flower spikes above handsome, spiny foliage. The fragrant flowers light up shade and lift a November day (4m/13ft).

9 Ilex aquifolium 'Alaska'
A spiny holly with smaller olive-green leaves. Ideal for clipping into tight shapes, or for cloud-cut hedges. Forms a conical bush if left. Good drainage (3m-7.5m/10ft-25ft).

10 Galanthus 'S. Arnott'
Tall, elegant snowdrop with pearl-drop flowers. Loves a sunny bank and spreads well, but slow to establish at first (28cm/11in).

11 Prunus mume 'Beni-chidori'
February needs this dramatic Japanese apricot with its dark branches clothed with almond-scented, madder-pink flowers. Accommodating (3m/10ft).

Eranthis hyemalis
12 Lonicera x purpusii 'Winter Beauty'
The most floriferous winter honeysuckle of all, with fragrant, creamy white flowers. Accommodating, flowers when young (2m x 2m/6.5ft x 6.5ft).

13 Iris unguicularis 'Mary Barnard'
An Algerian iris that starts in November and climaxes in a March extravaganza of violet-blue. South-facing wall (40cm/16in).

14 Cornus sanguinea 'Midwinter Fire'
A flickering bonfire of orange, pink and shot-silk twigs. Plant en masse where winter sun falls and thin the shoots lightly. Never cut back hard. Accommodating (1.5m/5ft).

15 Perovskia atriplicifolia 'Blue Spire'
Russian sage produces a winter skeleton of silver-white stems that rise up vertically from the ground. Good soil and a sunny position (1m/3ft).

16 Buxus sempervirens 'Suffruticosa'
The essential box for winter structure. Clip into tight shapes or low hedges in June. Repeat in September if needed. Good drainage (60cm-100cm/2ft-3ft).

17 Narcissus 'Cedric Morris'
Sun-loving, tiny daffodil that flowers by Christmas. Yellow flowers washed in green. Sun or woodland (20cm-30cm/8in-12in).

18 Euphorbia x martini
Velvety rosettes of weather-resistant, sage green foliage topped by spikes of lime flowers, each warmed by a tomato-red eye. Woodland (40cm/16in).

19 Photinia x fraseri 'Red Robin'
Light up winter with this compact mound of evergreen leaves topped by startling ruby-red new shoots (2.4m/8ft).

Galanthus 'S. Arnott'
20 Jasminum nudiflorum
Winter jasmine peppers its stems with acid-yellow flowers from November. Easy to train if cut back hard after flowering. Accommodating (4m/13ft).

21 Hamamelis x intermedia 'Pallida'
Spidery flowers by early January; the sulphur-yellow ribbons are scented and stand out well. Deep soil (3m x 4m/10ft x 13ft).

22 Skimmia x confusa 'Kew Green'
Compact mound of evergreen foliage supporting conical heads of ivory-white buds. Shade-tolerant (1.5m/5ft).

23 Ophiopogon planiscapus 'Nigrescens'
Ground-hugging black, grass-like plant that flatters snowdrops or pale crocus. Add drama to containers by pairing with red cyclamen. Hot spot (8cm/5in).

24 Cotoneaster 'Hybridus Pendulus'
The weeping branches of this small, semi-evergreen tree are laden with berries that birds ignore. Good drainage (3m/10ft).

25 Azara microphylla
Chilean wall shrub with inconspicuous yellow flowers that pack a fragrant vanilla punch on a mild day. Sunny wall (5m/16ft).

Reader offer: Winter shrubs

Photinia 'Red Robin', £24.95; Skimmia 'Kew Green', £24.95; Lonicera 'Winter Beauty' £19.95; all three £44.85.

Call 0870 950 5926, quoting TL454 or send cheques to Telegraph Garden to Dept TL454, Rookery Farm, Joys Bank, Holbeach St Johns, Spalding, PE12 8SG.

Go for exotic flowers this V-Day

2008-02-13T16:35:00.000-08:00

Rose may rule the roost on Valentine's Day, but if you want to make a statement this time or drop a romantic hint, pick up something more exotic - may be heliconia or anthurium or even an oriental lily

New Delhi: Cymbidium orchid, heliconia, hydrangea, anthurium, bird of paradise, oriental and Asiatic lilies are some of the choicest tropical varieties one can splurge on to pamper the beloved Feb 14.

"Valentine's Day is a very special occasion for love birds. Those who want to make it more special prefer exotic flowers over clichéd roses," Pawan Gadia, vice-president of the Ferns 'N' Petals Group and department head of e-commerce and retail, told IANS.

While the one-foot-long cymbidium stem that comes from Thailand costs Rs.1,500, hydrangea costs Rs.400, heliconia Rs.350 and oriental lily Rs.200, while Asiatic lilies, anthurium and bird of paradise are priced Rs.100 each.

"The urge among youngsters to be trendy, make a mark and even reflect their personality through the choice of flowers and gifts is also a reason that prompts youngsters to shell out extra bucks on these flowers for their love interests," he added.

However, the choice of colour remains restricted to red that signifies love and romance.

"Other than roses there is a high demand for flowers coming from overseas but in the red colour only. Red carnations are a hot favourite among those doing some last-minute shopping," said Sushma Arora, owner of Bunny Florists.

Shedding light on another facet, the president of Birju Phool Mandi, Birju Bhai Pradhan, quipped: "Actually those who love secretly and wish to express it indirectly give flowers other than roses to their love interest on this day."

Agreeing, Sriti Mishra, a call centre employee, said: "I am planning to drop a romantic hint to the person I am interested in by presenting him with some exotic flower on Valentine's Day. A rose would invariably be understood as a direct proposal."

Gadia also said the country's flower market estimates no less than Rs.4 billion. And exotic flowers account for about 25 percent of it.

"Compared to other special occasions like Mother's Day, the sale of flowers on V-Day is just double," he pointed out.

"Today's youth is well-travelled and has much knowledge about tropical flowers. Also, with more disposable income at their end and increasing fashion consciousness, the trend of gifting exotic flowers has a great future ahead," concluded Gadia.

Source: IANS

DU to celebrate its 50th year of 'Flower Show' on Feb 22

2008-02-06T03:36:00.000-08:00

New Delhi: Delhi University (DU) will celebrate the 50th year of the inception of its annual Flower Show on February 22 later this month. The show, started in 1958, is expected to draw around four to five thousand visitors this year, a university official said.

The event will be organised in the lawns of the Social Science building in front of Daulat Ram College.

"This time we will add some flavour to the event. We will be organizing a painting competition on February 15 to spread awareness on environmental issues and inculcate love for flowers, trees and greenery," University Garden Committee Secretary, Mr. Rajesh Tandon said.

The show has invited school and college students from the city to participate in the event. The event includes a biology quiz, cut flower, pot flower and Rangoli competition among a total of 63 competitions.

"The event will be a 'mini-fair' kind. Even street plays will be staged on the occasion by college students and some professionals," he added. Lt Governor of Delhi Tejender Khann will be the chief guest.

The Delhi University has the great tradition of maintaining greenery in and around it's campus. The University's two campuses - the North Campus and the South Campus, are well decorated with parks and gardens. The famous parks of DU are Mughal Garden, Jawahar Vatika and the Platinum Jubilee Park. The DU hostels have also well maintained gardens.

It is worth noting that DU has a Conservatory of around 250 species of rare and medicinal plants. To look after the gardens and parks in the campus, a total of about 150 gardeners have been appointed.

Garden gifts for your Valentine

2008-02-05T17:10:00.000-08:00

Stuck for what to get your loved one on St Valentine's Day? Elspeth Thompson has some gift ideas that won't wilt

Valentine's Day is fast approaching, and garage forecourts up and down the country will be doing a brisk trade in tired daffs or jet-lagged lilies flown halfway round the world and marked up to double the price.

But it doesn't take much time and imagination to come up with a real romantic gesture - and one that will last longer than a few days.

When you think of all the waste associated with Valentine's Day - the throwaway cards, the yards of cellophane, not to mention the air miles clocked up by roses guaranteed to droop before they open - how much better to give a living plant as a present.

Potted plants are so much more suggestive of permanent affection than a bunch of flowers, and on a purely pragmatic level, they give much better value for money.

You could choose a houseplant - jasmine, stephanotis and gardenias are fragrant and glamorous, or a passionflower vine, perhaps wound round a support in the shape of a heart, would speak for itself.

Or how about something which can be planted out in the garden in a few weeks' time?

If it has to be red roses - and they are, after all, the classic "I love you" flower - you can't get better than an entire bush of them that promises years of pleasure and passion ahead.

Look through the catalogues of Peter Beales (www.classicroses.co.uk; 01953 454707) or David Austin (www.davidaustinroses.com; 01902 376300) for inspiration, from the dark velvety tones of 'Empereur du Maroc' and the neat modern climber 'Guinee' to the scarlet, single-flowered species Rosa moyesii or sweet, spicy-scented 'Souvenir du Docteur Jamain', beloved of Vita Sackville-West.

Some have names as beautiful and romantic as their flowers - check out fiery, floriferous 'Intrigue' or, if pink is preferable to red, coral-pink 'Belle Amour' or pink-tinged 'Cuisse de Nymph'.

The only problem with giving a rose bush at this time of year is that unless, like the bushes in our special free offer (see panel), they have been specially forced into bloom for Valentine's Day, the plants are unlikely to be at their most attractive.

In fact, most are likely to resemble a bundle of thorny twigs in a pot. If your Valentine has a sense of humour, you could always tie a few fake plastic or paper flowers on to the bare branches with ribbon or, to be on the safe side, present a single stunning deep black-red 'Baccarat' cut rose alongside.

But roses are not the only flower of romance. According to my well-worn copy of Flower Lore (published 1880), myrtle has been a symbol of "glory and happiness in love" since Roman times.

Sacred, along with roses, to Aphrodite, goddess of love, it was often used in wedding rituals - a tradition revived by the Victorians.Indeed, the fluffy white flowers of myrtle figured large in Queen Victoria's own wedding bouquet, and many of the myrtle plants in our public and private gardens are directly descended from a tree that a gardener at Osborne House raised from a cutting.

With its neat glossy evergreen leaves and clusters of fragrant flowers followed by purple berries, Myrtis communis is a plant with quiet good taste. Though often sold as a small shrub, it can eventually grow into a tree up to 5 metres tall, if planted in a mild spot sheltered from cold winds. A small tree or bush, prettily wrapped and with a card explaining the symbolism, would make a great gift for male and female Valentines alike.

A potted camellia (signifying "Burning Love"), winter honeysuckle ("Devotion"), violas ("Let's Take a Chance on Happiness") or an orchid ("You have cast a spell over me") would also be most suitable, and each can be found in bloom at the moment. For more on the forgotten language of flowers, see the box above right.

If you do have to fall back on buying or sending cut flowers for Valentine's Day, might I remind you that beautiful scented 'Paperwhite' narcissi, grown in the famously mild climate of the Scilly Isles, are an environmentally sound alternative to exotics flown in from Kenya and Colombia?

From October to Easter, a box of 50 stems, picked at dawn, shipped by noon and sent by first class post, costs just £16.50 (including p&p) from www.scillyflowers.co.uk (08453451691, with last Valentine's orders by noon on Feb 12).

Wiggly Wigglers, famed for their wormeries and compost-makers, now do locally grown flowers by post and their enormous informal bouquets cost from £35 including p&p (www.wigglywigglers.co.uk, 01981 500391, last orders Feb 12).

Their early spring bunches also include British-grown daffodils and narcissi - just don't let on to the recipient that their Victorian meaning was "You are selfish".

If only the message behind the dreaded yellow carnation ('You have disappointed me') were widely enough known to dissuade anyone from buying a bunch from a service station on Valentine's eve.

Reader offer

Telegraph readers can claim a free 'Sentimental' red rose plant (RRP £14.99) supplied in a 10.5cm for the £4.25 cost of postage. Fill in the form on page 37 of the main paper and include the cheque to cover postage.

Orders to arrive no later than Feb 8 to receive potted rose by Feb 14. Offer closes Feb 25 and is available to UK addresses only, excluding RoI.

The language of flowers

Anemone I expect you
Arum lily Burning love
Bluebell Our love will last
Camellia I am longing for you
Carnation (white) Always remembering
Carnation (red) I carry a torch for you
Carnation (striped) Wish I were with you
Carnation (yellow) You have disappointed me
Daffodil The sun always shines when I am with you
Dahlia You are indifferent
Foxglove I cannot trust you
Heather Good luck
Honeysuckle Devotion
Hyacinth Please forgive me
Lily of the valley You are sweet and pure
Love-in-a-mist Do you love me?
Magnolia Have courage
Marguerite I live in hope
Narcissus You are selfish
Orchid You have cast a spell over me
Passion flower Trust
Peony Bashfulness
Pinks You are bold
Poppy Please wait
Primrose I might love you
Rose (red) I love you
Rose (pink) Please believe me
Rose (white) You are divine
Rose (yellow) Come back soon
Stock Lasting beauty
Sweet pea Gratitude
Viola Let's take a chance on happiness
Wallflower Constancy

Growing Flowers Can Lift Our Moods

2008-02-04T16:36:00.000-08:00

(Family Features) - Everyone loves receiving a gift of flowers, and research indicates having flowers around truly can lift the spirits. But did you know that you may get even more pleasure out of growing them because it appears that getting your hands in the soil is good for your mood, too.

Researcher Nancy Etcoff from Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital conducted a behavioral study to determine the effect flowers have on people's moods. She studied 54 people between the ages of 25 and 60 for one week. Each person was given a self-reporting questionnaire to determine his or her activities during the day -- whom they were with and what they were doing when they experienced a strong emotion. One-half of the participants had flowers consistently in their home environment, and the control group had no flowers.

The results indicated that flowers in the home influenced moods such as compassion and worry. The participants who had flowers were more compassionate, less negative, more likely to feel happy, and likely to have more enthusiasm and energy at work.

In another study, researchers from Bristol University and University College London found that naturally occurring "friendly" bacteria found in soil may affect the brain in a similar way as antidepressant drugs. Researchers first became interested in Mycobacterium vaccae bacteria after hearing that cancer patients treated with the bacteria reported increased vitality and cognitive function and a decrease in pain. The scientists theorized that Mycobacterium vaccae might stimulate serotonin production. Low levels of serotonin are linked with a number of disorders including anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and bipolar disorder. When they treated mice with Mycobacterium vaccae, the researchers found that it did stimulate the part of the brain that produces serotonin.

Consider these research studies your excuse for spending more time in your flower garden, and give a bouquet to someone you love.

Growing up in the garden

2008-02-03T02:39:00.000-08:00

There's something clearly amiss when a parent or two is puttering outside for hours in the glorious sunshine, while the kids are loafing indoors. It can be hard enough to get a kid outside - imagine trying to coax your Wii-addicted tween to help out in the garden. While different tactics work for different ages and personality types, gardening experts say the key is starting small. And a new PBS cable TV show is taking that literally, trying to get the littlest toddlers hooked on growing gardens.

You read that right - a television show is trying to get kids outside. The animated "Fifi and the Flowertots" started airing in mid-January on the children's channel PBS Kids Sprout. Fifi is a little girl-flower who lives in a tiny world. She has friends as tiny as she is, and they like to garden. (That's organic gardening, mind you.) "It's very fresh, very gentle ... a very clean, healthy lifestyle with lots of laughter and some tears," says the show's London-based executive producer, Greg Lynn. "Fifi" will teach young children a few particulars about gardening, although the show isn't fixated exclusively on the subject. Fifi is supposedly an expert gardener, and one of her best friends is "Mo," her compost-powered mower, who helps her tend and harvest her garden. But let's say you can drag your kid away from the TV. What's next? You'd think Julie Stricker's daughter, Edie, 4-1/2, was born with a gardening "gene," but really, Stricker simply has given Edie the freedom to gradually fall in love with the garden. And she has.

Plant profile: Snapdragon

2008-02-02T15:52:00.000-08:00

Scientific name: Antirrhinum majus.Growth habit: Upright to rounded annuals growing to 4 feet tall and a foot wide. The leaves are dark green and lancelike and grow to 4 inches long and an inch wide.Light: Grows and flowers best in full sun; tolerates light shade.

Water needs: Prefers a moist soil; grows best if watered weekly during the dry times.Feedings: Apply a general garden fertilizer monthly or use a slow-release fertilizer as instructed on the label.Propagation: Start plants from seed.Ease of culture: Easy.Hardiness: Hardy; tolerates all but severe freezes.Major problems: Nematodes can affect the roots; plant in nematode-free soil. Aphids and chewing insects are also occasional pests that can be controlled with natural sprays as needed.Pruning: Remove flower stalks that have finished opening buds to encourage additional blooms. Also, stake taller varieties to prevent wind damage. Remove from flower beds when the hot, rainy season arrives.Uses: A reliable cool-season annual planted October through April. Taller varieties are best used as solitary plantings or backdrops for lower-growing flowers. Shorter selections can be clustered for mass plantings or used as an edging for beds. Snapdragons make good container additions and are often combined with other annuals. The blooms form along spikes held above the foliage that might be a foot or more in length. Individual flowers might have the traditional dragonhead look or be open-faced and resembling a butterfly. The taller flower spikes often are cut for bouquets.Florida native: No; native to the Mediterranean region.

Helping the honeybee retake its place

2008-02-01T16:51:00.000-08:00

HAVE YOU EVER thought about the role honeybees play in our world? Bees pollinate at least 130 fruit, vegetable, nut, ornamental and fiber crops in the United States, and contribute about $15 billion annually through improved crop yields and product quality.
Additionally millions of dollars are generated through the sale of hive products such as honey, wax, pollen, royal jelly and venom. When crops that need pollination fail to get pollinated, they don't produce. This can be easily seen in the vegetable garden when growing pumpkins, squash, or melons. A plant may form a small fruit, but it soon shrivels and falls off the plant if the flower was not pollinated.
There are many different types of bees, but the ones that are kept by beekeepers and have historically served as our best-known pollinators are the honeybees. Though called natives, they are really from Europe. They have existed for centuries in the wild, but with the recent problems, feral bees have basically disappeared.
There are other types of bees that serve as pollinators; solitary mason bees and bumblebees are two, but they are not kept by humans for honey production.
Bees are truly hard workers. They must collect nectar from about 2 million flowers to make 1 pound of honey. The average forager makes about one-twelfth teaspoon of honey in its lifetime, so the next time you add a couple of teaspoons of honey to your tea, consider how many bees worked to make those two teaspoons.
I've received several inquiries in recent months from gardeners concerned about the honeybees' plight. Though gardeners can't help much with problems such as mites or colony collapse disorder, there are still ways to help out. The first is to limit the use of pesticides in the landscape and garden. Bees are day foragers, so they are out and about during the day, visiting flowers and collecting pollen. Be careful not to apply insecticides during the daytime hours--if you must use them at all.
It's a common assumption that insecticides are the only pesticides harmful to bees, but that's not the case. Some fungicides such as Captan are harmful to them--particularly if applied when bees are gathering pollen and nectar. Even 2,4-D is listed as highly toxic, according to Ohio State University, if bees are present during application or one to two days following. 2,4-D is the chemical in a number of popular lawn herbicides used to control broadleaf weeds such as dandelions. The complete listing is available at ohioline.osu.edu/hyg-fact/2000/2161.html.

Garden advice: Thorny problems

2008-01-31T16:36:00.000-08:00

Garden tips and advice from our resident expert Helen Yemm. This week: Gardeners' Question Time and pruning apple trees

The week beforehand the village was all of a-twitter. Tickets were like gold dust. Finally, after a 20-year wait, BBC Radio 4's Gardeners' Question Time came to Wadhurst, East Sussex. On the night of the recording session, the great and the good of the Garden Society, and many more of us besides, assembled promptly in the Commemoration Hall (which had been lavishly decorated with the village's finest flowers and produce).
There were the customary trailing wires, serious young women with clipboards and headsets, glaring lights and, above all, a pervading sense of expectancy and bonhomie that is a quintessential part of a once-in-a-lifetime English village event such as this.
So, did Gardeners' Question Time live up to expectations? Did the village have its gardening questions answered and conundrums dealt with? We certainly worked hard at it: the Chosen Few shyly read out their questions; the rest of us applauded on cue during a recording session that lasted a buttock-numbing two and a half hours or more.
Yes, I suppose we did have our questions answered, if you take into account that questions about the nation's most notorious bugbears - slugs, snails and vine weevils - are just too humdrum to merit the panel's attention, and those about planting by the phases of the moon just too off-the-wall.
Cutting-edge horticulture this possibly wasn't - but, as a piece of light, slightly waffly, almost visual radio entertainment for people who love to garden, it more or less hit the spot.
Furthermore the panel showed absolutely no signs of experiencing déjà vu or boredom and seemed genuinely to engage with us. In the blasé, makeover-weary, celebrity-conscious 21st century, this familiar, comfortable old chestnut manages to gently inform, amuse and reassure and is still understandably revered after 60 years.
It makes you wonder who dreamt up Radio 4's latest gardening offering, The Garden Quiz - a dull affair that pits assorted clever-clogs against each other in round after round of horticultural boffinry. And how long it will last, I wonder?
Two o'clock on a Sunday afternoon, several weeks later: nothing was stirring in Wadhurst as residents huddled around their crystal sets (OK, I exaggerate a little) to find out who had been left in and who had been edited out.
In fact, a surprising amount of the stuff I recall survived intact - complete with mirth and applause. The weirdly orchestrated repeats had been seamlessly woven in and gaps magically filled with up-to-date weather reports to make it sound "live".
The most memorable pearl of wisdom? He Who Mulch-Mows should get out there a tad more often if he doesn't want his lawn to acquire that tell-tale "wet corn circle" look.
But it was all good, if long-winded, stuff. Gratifyingly, the hard-working ladies from the wool shop, the leading lights of the Garden Society who had brought the whole event to fruition and even baked a splendid anniversary cake that we all enjoyed with the panel after the show, had a question about their overbearing magnolia tree answered ("prune it" was the verdict) and thus enjoyed their deserved, long-awaited few minutes in the sun.

Rose sale witness a boom ahead of Valentine's Day

2008-01-30T15:03:00.000-08:00

Krishnagiri (Tamil Nadu), Jan 29 : The business in roses is witnessing a mega boom ahead of Valentine's Day in Tamil Nadu's Krishnagiri District.
Krishnagiri, which is about 250 km from Chennai, has a climate that is ideal for rose cultivation. As a result of this, floriculture thrives and business in roses is witnessing a mega boom.
Pushpanchali Rose Garden, located in Krishnagiri is the largest rose production centre in the region, growing lakhs of roses in eleven varieties.
A one-hectare farm can grow as many as 70,000 rose plants. And each plant produces at least 20 to 22 flowers every year in ideal "glass house" conditions.
With Valentine's Day approaching on February 14, orders are pouring in from around the world for roses grown in this region.
"Our daily production of roses comes to around 15 to 20,000 roses. These are directly sold in the Indian market that is in Bangalore and New Delhi mainly. From this place, the deemed exporters are exporting them to other countries. The annual average rate of our roses is about Rs. 3 and the prices go as high as Rs10-15 per rose during the festive season," said Varghese, Manager, Pushpanchali Floritech.
During the Valentine season, grand gala and frost red colours are eternal favourites.
The owners of these farms are paying special attention to aspects like cooling, grading and growing coupled with the use of automated irrigation systems, the yield of flowers particularly the roses is at par with international standards.
"This yellow coloured flower is blooming and has not bent. This is because it has the support of the net. If there is no support of the net, these flowers won't be standing straight and will bend. This affects the quality of the flower," said Nand Kishore, horticulturist.
The domestic market is also witnessing considerable growth.
With Valentines' Day nearing, dealers expect a rise in exports as well as sales in the domestic market.
During this season, the flowers are mainly exported to the Middle East and European countries as well as Australia, Japan, Singapore and Malaysia. (ANI)

GARDEN PARTY

2008-01-28T15:31:00.000-08:00

This year's garden and flower show at Balls Plantation, Christ Church, was another big success.
Jennifer Weetch, president of the Barbados Horticultural Society, said yesterday members had decided to start the show earlier at 10 a.m. instead of 2 p.m, and they were reaping the benefits.
"We just thought people might want to participate earlier so we tried it and it worked. It was time for a change," she said.
In attendance was Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Haynesley Benn, a former judge of the fruit and vegetable section and a regular visitor to the show in years past.
Benn said: "So far I'm impressed and fascinated by the variety but they need to pay more attention to fruits and vegetables and get more people involved for next year."
Also on display were art and craft and presentations on pest management. The flower show continues today at Balls Plantation. (CA)

Easy-to-grow rudbeckias liven up gardens

2008-01-27T15:48:00.000-08:00

Each year the board of directors of the National Garden Bureau selects one flower and one vegetable to be showcased. They are chosen because they are easy to grow from seed, widely adaptable, genetically diverse and versatile.
The NGB flower selection for 2008 is the rudbeckia, commonly known as the black-eyed Susan. Native to North America, rudbeckias can be found growing as wildflowers in fields and along roadsides across the country. These reliable plants shine in the garden with an abundance of brightly colored flowers reflecting the brilliant yellows and oranges of the summer sun.
Maine gardeners interested in growing native wildflowers should focus on forms of Rudbeckia hirta, a short-lived perennial that is best grown as a self-sowing annual in Maine gardens. The cultivars described here all bloom from July until frost.
‘Indian Summer,’ an All-America Selections winner from 1995, produces stunning 5- to 9-inch flowers, double and semidouble, on plants that reach about 3 feet tall. The golden-yellow flowers, borne on sturdy stems with vigorous branching, are ideal for cutting.
Another AAS winner is ‘Cherokee Sunset,’ with semidouble and double 2- to 4-inch flowers in shades of yellow, orange, bronze and mahogany. Plants reach about 30 inches tall.
Several shorter varieties are available for growing in containers and in small gardens. ‘Becky’ produces dwarf 10- to 12-inch plants with large, 3-inch flowers in orange, yellow and cinnamon bicolor. ‘Toto’ is dwarf and compact with smaller flowers covering the 12- to 15-inch-tall plants. Several single colors are available as well as a mix. Other popular varieties are ‘Corona,’ ‘Cordoba,’ ‘Sonora’ and the fully double ‘Maya.’
Looking for something different? The 2003 AAS winner ‘Prairie Sun’ produces spectacular 5-inch blooms with golden-yellow petals tipped with a brush of lighter primrose yellow surrounding a striking, light-green center cone. The 3-foot-tall branching plants can be grown in gardens and large containers.
Experts at the NGB offer the following advice for growing rudbeckias:
ä Soil — Rudbeckias tolerate a range of soil types but prefer a moist, well-drained soil that’s not too rich. Excess fertilizer can make plants weak and cause flower stems to flop. Water when the soil is dry to maintain even moisture.
ä Sunlight — All rudbeckias thrive in full sun. They grow well in light shade, but flowers may be smaller and fewer in number.
ä Spacing — The mature size of the plant determines the correct spacing. Allow 8-12 inches between rudbeckias being grown as annuals. Dwarf varieties can be planted closer together with 4- to 6-inch spacing between plants.
ä Plant care — To promote blooming and extend the flowering period, remove or deadhead faded flowers by pinching off blooms at the base of the flower stem. Be aware that rudbeckias often self-seed, resulting in new seedlings sprouting up around the garden. Extra plants may need to be removed or transplanted to prevent crowding.
Rudbeckias are a must for the pollinator garden, attracting native bees and butterflies. If you want to attract birds to the garden, allow the old flowers on the plant to go to seed.
Look for plants of the newest Rudbeckia varieties at garden centers this spring. Or grow your own plants from seed. The Johnny’s Selected Seed catalog for 2008 lists both ‘Indian Summer’ and ‘Prairie Sun.’

Sex satire 'Teeth' provides feminist bite

2008-01-25T16:22:00.000-08:00

"Teeth" is the "Incredible Hulk" of sex satires. When boys take advantage of sweet, vestal Dawn (Jess Weixler) they lose their penises. This girl might have a flower. But the flower has mandibles.
As amateurishly made as it is, "Teeth" runs on a kind of angry distrust toward boys. It doesn't think a lot of them, in much the same way certain teen comedies and horror films don't think highly of girls. The reversal is a lot more satisfying to watch, both as a laughing feminist critique of horniness and as a gleeful inversion of the vagina dentata myth. It's all the more striking because the movie has been written and directed by Mitchell Lichtenstein, a 51-year-old man.
Dawn is an enthusiastic young voice in a high-school chastity group. It's treated like a cult. She preaches the sanctity of holding out, wearing a little red promise ring on her finger. Her one sex fantasy is set on her wedding night. The groom hikes up her dress, but then the image of the snapping jaws she saw in an old science-fiction movie pops into her head. When one nice kid suddenly forces himself on Dawn, Dawn's jaws force themselves on him. She's horrified, does an Internet search, discovers she might actually have the fabled vagina dentata, and consults a gynecologist.
Until that gynecologist visit, everything about the movie is forced. For about 40 minutes or so, "Teeth" is a comedy whose gags don't work. One shot in a forest starts by staring into the hollow part of a tree, and when Dawn and a chaste suitor go swimming they wind up exploring a cave. The movie's early tone isn't outlandish enough to get a real laugh. Having that little house of Dawn's nestled at the foot of a smoking nuclear reactor is a touch that's simultaneously discreet and too much. (Is that why Dawn's mother is dying?) For about an hour you're desperate for the cheap irreverence of John Waters, which is there once Dawn tries to flee the doctor's examination table while the doctor's arm is still stuck in her teeth.
Part of the reason you're nervous to find this funny is because you're waiting for Dawn to find it funny, too - or you're waiting for Jess Weixler to. And for almost 40 minutes, it seems like the movie might be humming along at the expense of both the character and the woman playing her. But eventually Lichtenstein hands the movie over to his star, who proves remarkably game for the silliness she's required to perform. Weixler gets a joke that initially seemed to be on her. She delivers the cues for the movie's comedy.
Lichtenstein is the son of the artist Roy Lichtenstein, and that oversize, sometimes-funny-sometimes-not sensibility must be genetic. As a director, Mitchell's glee in showing actual severed penises probably owes more to the Troma film house than to anybody else. But watching the movie, I thought about the taunting, damning work of certain artists labeled as "feminist" - Georgia O'Keeffe, Barbara Kruger, and Joyce Wieland, for starters. In that vein, there's something almost subversive about Lichtenstein's affection for his heroine and the pleasure she ultimately takes in re-appropriating a misogynistic myth. By the end of the film she's not some virginal damsel. She's on the verge of becoming a vaginal vigilante.

Orchids: Caring for works of art

2008-01-24T16:58:00.000-08:00

We're a bit stuck in our ways with orchids. The moth orchid, the phalaenopsis, is a staunch and reliable house plant. Yes, it flowers for four or five months and, yes, it suits the modern, centrally heated way of life - but I'd urge you all to be a bit more adventurous. There are other cool-growing, equally easy, more beautiful and certainly more interesting orchids to grow, and they are becoming much easier to find. I've just walked out of McBean's Orchids in East Sussex with an incredible selection.
Cymbidiums
The first family I went for were the cymbidiums. I'd always thought these - with their vast bulbs, great strap-like leaves, and, in my view, rather rubbery, slightly coarse flowers - were too big for a house plant, but that's all changed. Recent breeding has produced miniature varieties and many of them are fantastic.
Miniature can mean twee, but not in this case. The flowers are spectacular, most of them about 5cm across, with a plant growing to no more than 45cm.

phalaenopsis, these will fit easily on a window ledge. And that's where Jim Durrant, head horticulturist at McBean's, recommends they grow, either on a cool windowsill (nowhere near a radiator), or in a cool greenhouse (see details overleaf).
As ever, the ones I liked were rich dark crimson or sharp acid green, but there are varieties in almost every pattern and colour except blue. As for named forms, that's not in the main how it works. Each and every nursery tends to breed and create its own seedlings, so unlike with cloned varieties, natural variation takes place. This means that you're buying not so much a named variety as a character and type.
Zygopetalums
The other family I went for were the zygopetalums. These are easy to look after - as easy, if not easier, than the phalaenopsis crew - and have lovely sweet scent, ranging from slightly camphory to gardenia-like, so sniff before you buy.
This group flowers from September onwards, right through the winter. The individual flower spikes don't last as long as a phalaenopsis but they will sometimes produce two flower crops in one year. I loved the flower form of these, which has a soft, less-waxy texture than the cymbidiums and lightly ruffled edges.
The colours were all my favourites - greens, crimson-blacks, deep purples with stipples and splotches on the lips in a strongly contrasting tone.
Slipper orchids
Paphiopedilums (slipper orchids), which have a flower form very similar to our native lady's slipper orchid, are the most exotic of the lot. These need good shading and a warm, humid spot. I've seen them do well in bathrooms.
They are very shy rooting, so little watering is the key. Slipper orchids divide into two groups, the plain-leaved, larger-flowered types and the fascinating mottled-leaved lot (see front), which have extraordinarily intricate flower shapes and colours.
Odontoglossums
The final group for the real plant enthusiast is the odontoglossums. They have a great depth and variation to them: "Real class," says Jim, "and a relaxed grace and beauty." They grow at 12,000ft in the Andes and need lots of shade and a slight chill in the air to thrive.
"Think of walking into a cathedral or a wet milking parlour and that's where they'd like to grow," says Jim. He also showed me a delicate, small-flowered Osmoglossum pulchellum, which you grow in much the same way. Like the zygopetalums, this variety has a lovely scent, which is why it is known as the lily of the valley orchid.
Only 35 years ago, a tropical orchid cost as much as the average weekly wage - "about £400 in current money". Those I bought ranged from £15 to £25, and each and every one will be in flower for at least a month or two.
A note on cymbidiums
It's important to put cymbidiums outside in the summer. They need a good contrast between day and night temperatures in June and July to initiate flower spike formation, which are then produced the following late winter and spring. Without this, your orchid won't bloom.

How to grow
Water only when the pots are properly dried out and give them very little food.
Water with rain water. Tap water is too salty.
Their ideal temperature is 14C in the day and 10C at night.
To increase humidity, fill a saucer with pebbles and water, then put an upturned saucer on the pebbles and stand the orchid pot on top.
Cymbidiums, zygopetalums and most other cool-climate orchids prefer dappled light to bright sun.
Reader offer
Telegraph Gardening readers can buy one slipper orchid for only £19.99 or one cymbidium for £20.99. Plants are supplied in 11cm and 12cm pots respectively. Dispatched from February 2008. All orders acknowledged, advising dispatch date.
Send orders to: Telegraph Garden, Dept. TE665, PO Box 99, Sudbury, Suffolk, CO10 2SN. Make cheques/postal orders out to Telegraph Garden, or phone 0844 573 6015 for credit/debit-card orders, quoting ref. TE665. Delivery to all UK addresses.

Better Shasta daisies

2008-01-22T16:16:00.000-08:00

Everyone loves the simplicity of bright, white Shasta daisies -- they are the kind of flowers a child might draw. But of the varieties available today, which are the best performers?
The Chicago Botanic Garden set out to answer that question in 1999 when it began conducting trials of 36 cultivars of this favorite flower, botanically known as Leucanthemum x superbum. Earlier this month, the garden published its report on Shastas and the related oxeye daisies, Leucanthemum vulgare.
Top-rated plants were the Shastas 'Amelia' and 'Becky,' and the oxeyes 'May Queen' and 'Filigran.' All won five-star excellence ratings, meaning they were consistently healthy and produced a heavy crop of flowers.
'Becky' already is the most popular Shasta daisy in the United States due to its sturdy habit and dependability. It was named in 2003 as the Perennial Plant Association's "Perennial of the Year."
Daisies prefer fertile, well-drained soils and a spot in full sun. They are intolerant of boggy soil, and some varieties in the trials suffered crown damage or root rot due to excessive winter soil moisture. Cold itself is not a problem; all of the plants in this genus are hardy to Zone 5, one zone farther north than most of New Jersey.
To order a copy of "A Report on Leucanthemum x superbum and Related Daisies," send $3 to Plant Evaluation Notes, c/o Richard Hawke, Chicago Botanic Garden, 1000 Lake Cook Road, Glencoe, IL 60022.

Metro Plus Coimbatore

2008-01-21T05:14:00.000-08:00

Amherstia nobilis, locally known as Simsapa, is one of the sacred trees of India. It belongs to the family Caesalpiniaceae.
Simsapa was found in a temple garden in Burma in 1826 and hence famously known by the name ‘Pride of Burma.’ The generic name Amherstia comes from Countess Amherst, wife of a former governor of Burma.
The species name nobilis’ comes from the noble honour bestowed on the tree. The flowers are given a special place in Buddhist temples in Burma and Sri Lanka. Simsapa is rarely seen in India.
The Simsapa is a beautiful tree which grows up to 12 metres in height. It is suitable for avenue planting as well as landscape gardening.
A hot humid climate is preferred, and it will not grow well in dry arid regions. The soil should be rich. Propagation is usually by air layering. They are divided into about six pairs of oppositely placed leaflets. The tender leaves are mauve to purple in colour and later become bright green.
Flowering occurs between February and May. Petals are crimson red with two medium-sized petals yellow at the tip. The largest petal is broad and fan-shaped with a wavy upper margin and a yellow triangle extending from the lip down into the flower. This tree of beauty and rarity deserves further attention by tree lovers and gardeners.

Lalbagh flower show is a visual treat

2008-01-20T05:17:00.000-08:00

BANGALORE: It’s that time of the year when people pay their biannual homage to Lalbagh which, amid a highly polluted and concrete jungle, stands tall as a refreshing testament to India’s Garden City.
Apart from being every photographer’s dream destination, the Lalbagh Republic Day flower show, organised by the Department of Horticulture, attracts visitors from all over the State.
The flower show, inaugurated on Saturday, features over a hundred varieties of winter flowering plants and annual plants, like the marigold, morning glory, sweet peas, celosia and poppy, among others.
B.S. Sridhar, a visitor, said that it is a golden opportunity to see so many colourful flowers under one roof. Not only was it pleasing to the eye, he said, it was a balm for the soul. “The flower show is a treat to those who are interested in gardening and I eagerly wait every year to buy the various plants on sale,” said Devi Menon, a homemaker.
A group of farmers called Kan Flora from Sirsi, Karnataka, has come with a colourful stock of over 25 varieties of orchids for sale. They have been attending the flower show for two years now. Sadanand Hegde, an orchidologist associated with the group, said: “The farmers benefit a lot from this show by learning new techniques and information regarding horticulture.”
A wide variety of vegetables are on display, apart from seeds and saplings of the flowering plants and vegetables.
The Horticulture Department has put up an exhibition on the ‘Role of horticulture food and nutrition security’.
The exhibition, through posters, depicts the crop diversity in Karnataka, the nutritional values of fruit and vegetable, kitchen garden and so on. A flower pattern made of seashells by the tsunami-affected people of Pulicat village, Tamil Nadu, was the special attraction of the day.

What worked in the garden

2008-01-19T03:32:00.000-08:00

2007 wasn't a banner year for me in the garden. Family responsibilities hit in a big way when my mother passed away in early April. Between running back and forth to Dad's house on weekends and dealing with other issues, the garden ended up taking a back seat.
To be honest, I didn't even get my front yard replanted after I had all the old over-grown plants removed. So my house, sad to say, doesn't really look like the home of a gardener.
But I did manage to get some garden time in the backyard beds, and I've found a few new plants that are very worthy of recognition.
For starters, there was the box of test plants I received from Proven Winners. They will be available for sale this spring, and there were a few standouts: the annuals Lantana 'Luscious Grape'; Angelonia 'Angleface White Imp' and 'Angelface Dark Violet'; Calibrachoa 'Superbells Apricot Punch,' 'Superbells Dreamsicle' and 'Superbells Saffron' and Cuphea 'Totally Tempted.'
The Angelonia is a shorter, less leggy variety that I highly recommend over the old types. In containers, with water and regular fertilizing, they kept going all season right up until frost.
The lilac 'Beauty of Moscow' is another plant that I wouldn't be without. The smell of this beauty is beyond description, far outstripping the scent of the old garden lilacs at the bottom of the yard. This isn't a new plant, but it certainly is well worth seeking out if you're looking for a lilac.
The small ornamental shrub Weigelia 'My Monet' really came into its own this summer. This is the second year for it, but the lovely little shrub, which is very small, topping out at about a foot, sports multicolor leaves that last all season. It's a great accent plant in the front of the border, and some of my friends have had luck with it in containers.
Kolkwitzia amabilis 'Dream Catcher' is a beauty bush that has golden yellow foliage and an orange fall color, which complement the flowers and make it a shrub for many seasons. This is the first year for the plant in my plot, but it promises to be a winner.
For those who like rose of Sharon, a new variety called 'Lil Kim' may be of interest. Though I've never been a big fan of these semi-weedy plants, this little guy might change my mind. It tops off at 3 to 4 feet tall with large white flowers sporting a red eye. The flowers last three days, instead of the usual one. As with most rose of Sharon, which you couldn't kill with a torch, it seems to be quite hardy. This just might be the plant to stick in that difficult spot.Look for this plant
In the new issue of Fine Gardening magazine, Allan Armitage mentions a new Joe-Pye weed (Eupatorium) called 'Phantom.' Usually when Mr. Armitage mentions something, it's worth a look, and this plant sounds like just the ticket for those of us who have smaller gardens. This plant gets no bigger than 3 feet, unlike the 6- to 8-foot varieties. While it is not proven if this plant will remain reliably short, it's worth a try. He mentions two outlets for this plant: Big Dipper Farms, http://www.bigdipperfarm.com/ or Plant Delights Nursery at http://www.plantdelights.com/.Garden shows
Now here's a few gardening related things you might want to mark on your calendar. Two outstanding out-of-town garden shows are coming soon.
The first one is the National City Home & Garden Show in Cleveland. Held at the IX Center, this show is always full of interesting things for gardeners, along with many exhibition gardens, and it is, in my experience, worth the drive. This season the garden theme is "Bella Italia." The show will be Feb. 2-10, for more information visit www. homeandflower .com.
The other is the queen mother of all U.S. garden shows, the 2008 Philadelphia Flower Show at the Pennsylvania Convention Center. The show will be March 2-9 and the theme is "Jazz It Up!" If you have the time and the ability, this is one show that all gardeners should see at least once in a lifetime.
Absolute nirvana for gardeners with unbelievable garden displays. And after you finish marveling at the displays, you can shop in the gardener's market. For more information, visit http://www.theflowershow.com/.
More locally, the Phipps Plant Auction will be May 2 at the Phipps Garden Center and the annual May Market, also at the Garden Center, now in its 73rd year, will be open to the public May 16-18.Feeling good and dirty
And lastly, cut this item and wave it in front of the clean unbelievers in your life, who think getting dirty in the garden is a nutty way to spend time. In the Jan./Feb. issue of Garden Gate magazine, an item says that researchers at Bristol University and University College London have found that a soil bacteria called Mycobacterium vaccae helps elevate mood. Studies with mice found that the bacterium affects the brain in a similar way to antidepressants. So you really aren't crazy after all! Garden on.

In the sweet midwinter

2008-01-18T16:39:00.000-08:00

Yes, it's cold and gloomy outside, with just about every last drop of colour drained from the landscape, but there is still lots to enjoy in the weeks ahead.

There's nothing like a bit of snow to transform the winter garden: boughs decked in glistening flakes, the lawn vanished under a crisp white carpet. These days, though, the snowy garden is a fleeting and occasional pleasure. So how do you maintain a magical a wintry garden scene without the white stuff? Easy - you just need a few essential elements.
Structure
Structure is important in the garden all year, but when laid bare in winter structural weaknesses are more obvious. Structure begins with the shape and layout. The direction in which a path runs, say, is crucial: if it cuts across a rectilinear garden at an angle or in a curve, it will break up the shape and make it appear larger. Long, thin gardens can be divided into sections with connecting features so the space seems shorter, wider and more interesting all round.
Plants, too, have structural presence. Clipped evergreens, such as box (Buxus sempervirens) and yew (Taxus baccata) in cones or balls, can unify a space, creating a sense of rhythm through repetition. Plants that have the same qualities as topiary but don't need to be clipped have a similar effect - Pittosporum 'Tom Thumb', say, forms a tight, low globe of bronze-purple foliage that's at its best in winter and especially effective with white-stemmed plants; and Juniperus 'Blue Arrow' has the pencil-like shape of an Italian cypress, bluish foliage and makes a superb vertical accent. And, of course, vertical space is usually limitless.
Fragrance
Plants that flower in winter have a tough job attracting pollinating insects, because so few are alive and on the wing, so many have exceptionally fragrant flowers - it's the survival of the smelliest. Plants such as winter sweet (Chimonanthus praecox) have such fragrant blooms that the scent wafts for tens of metres and more. It has another trick, too: the individual blooms are thick and waxy, making them largely frost-proof. Sarcococca confusa is both a structurally strong and highly fragrant plant, with smart, glossy, evergreen foliage and tiny, white flowers that are born at the same time as purple-black berries. It also tolerates deep shade and dry soil.
There's a whole range of winter-flowering viburnum, and most are easy to grow. V. x bodnantense hybrids are probably the most accommodating, with scented blooms in varying shades of pink.
Stems
Winter is a time to enjoy the more subtle aspects of the garden. Plants with attractive bark and stem coloration now take centre stage. Perhaps the finest are the dogwoods (cornus species and their cultivars), with stems of orange, green-gold and blood red, and they often have exceptional autumn colour, too. There are numerous new cultivars, but often the old established plants are best: Cornus alba 'Sibirica' has been around for years, and has exceptional, dark red colouration, while C. sanguinea 'Midwinter Fire' has stems that are dark orange at the tips and that fade to golden yellow lower down. The white-stemmed rubus need careful placement, because they spread by suckers and can become thuggish. Stem-colour willows, such as Salix alba cultivars, require more space, as do the many fine coloured bark trees, from the ghostly white Betula utilis 'Greyswood Ghost' to the glossy cinnamon Prunus serrula, but they'll repay their selection on dark days.
Seed heads and grasses
The Dutch designer Piet Oudolf once said that a plant was of real value only if it looked as good dead as alive. He certainly had a point. There is something magnificent about the stately decline of many perennials; the gradual unpeeling and shredding of seed heads and the blanching of stems to straw white. Gardeners who, in the misplaced belief that it cleanses the garden of pests, cut everything to the ground in autumn miss out on this winter beauty. And all those seed heads and stems don't add only visual charm, they provide vital food and habitat for a wide range of animals.
Late-flowering grasses, such as miscanthus, cortaderia and my favourite, Calamagrostis brachytricha, look good right through winter, as do the snake-like stems of Veronicastrum 'Fascination', the seed heads of Monarda 'Neon' (big and black as a snowman's eyes) and the teasel, a plant of particular value to finches.
Light
The element that we most crave in winter is the one most lacking: light. Light-reflective surfaces, such as paint, paving or walling materials, or materials with a mirror finish, all help to raise light levels. And don't forget water, either.
Give trees and shrubs a "crown-lift" (ie, remove lower branches), and select plants with light-coloured stems. Perhaps most important is to understand where the light falls and place the plants that give the greatest winter interest in those areas where they will be illuminated by whatever light there is.

Jazz Up Your Winter Garden

2008-01-17T15:47:00.000-08:00

Does your winter garden need a little jazzing up? Here are a few suggestions for plants that will catch your eye and bring a bit of color or drama to your winter garden.

The early blooms of Daphne odora 'Marginata' (Winter Daphne) or the lovely Hellebores (Lenten Rose) or Pieris japonica (Lily of the Valley shrub) which are just opening now can be the first of a succession of blooms to look forward to before the weather really warms up. As soon as you begin to notice the days getting longer, the Chaenomeles (Flowering Quince) and Forsythia are showing off their lovely late winter colors.

Beyond flower color there are many shrubs whose bright berries will reward you with winter interest and feed the birds as well. Some of the best for our area are the Ilex (Holly) family, Cotoneasters, Berberis (Barberry), and Heteromeles (Toyon). Placing some of these shrubs in your landscape will reward you for many years to come in the doldrums of winter and if you tuck in a few Primroses, Cyclamens or Pansies at their feet you’ll be further rewarded with rich annual color throughout the cold winter.

Many times dry flower heads such as Sedum 'Autumn Joy' or dry plumes of the grasses like Miscanthus species can be gentle reminders that fall is behind us and that spring is just around the corner. If we can assist you with plant design or selection for your winter or spring garden, please contact us. We deliver plants directly to your site.

At Plant Providers, our landscape designers, certified arborists, and other landscape professionals provide a full range of landscape services to residential and commercial customers. Visit our website or call 314-2668.

Three ways to aid an ailing lawn

2008-01-16T15:56:00.000-08:00

Q. My lawn is so bad that I'm considering just roto-tilling the entire thing, spreading fresh top soil and reseeding. Please advise. -- Ed C. A. I'm often asked this question by students who are frustrated with their weedy landscapes. Lawns that have a significant stand of grass and are less than 50 percent weeds can often be rehabilitated, especially if the weeds are predominantly annual species. Consider three types of remedial action: selective weed control, de-thatching and core aeration.
Selective weed control: For lawns with less intense annual weeds and few perennial weeds, selective herbicides can be used. This may help curb competition with weeds and give lawns with rhizomes such as bluegrass a chance to fill in. Always read and follow label directions carefully when using herbicides for weed control. Avoid using any herbicides when temperatures exceed 85 degrees and humidity levels are high to prevent direct damage to lawn grass. Visit njaes.rutgers.edu/pubs and click on "gardening and landscaping," then "lawns." Here, you'll find information on recommended herbicides and details on lawn care procedures.
De-thatching: This can be done in the late summer or early fall to control thatch exceeding Â½-inch in thickness, but not excessively thick thatch. This should be done in two directions perpendicular to one another with the de-thatching blades penetrating Â½-inch into the soil. Rake off the thatch and place it in the compost pile.
De-thatching is best done when soils have moderate moisture levels. Excessive moisture will tear up turf grass and dry conditions may prevent penetration of de-thatching machines or core aerators. If it's been dry, irrigate with Â½-inch of water and wait a day or two before de-thatching or core aerating.
Core aeration for low to moderate compaction: Core aeration machines can be rented the same as de-thatching machines to help loosen compacted soils. Do this in the fall or spring. Early fall is really the best time for renovation to allow lawn grasses to recover in the cool part of the season.
In some cases, it may be best to do a complete lawn makeover. Lawn renovation is best done in early fall. It can be undertaken in the spring, but vigorous weeds, stimulated by spring rains, will be a bigger problem. Indications that it's time for a complete overhaul include the proliferation of perennial weeds, excessive thatch and severely compacted soils.
Perennial weeds: If you have more than 50 percent perennial weeds, you may need to start over. Select two to three areas 10 feet square and determine the percentage of perennial weeds coverage during late spring or summer.
Perennial weeds can live and flower for more than one season and include wild garlic (Allium vineale), yellow nutsedge (Cyperus esculentus), quack grass (Elytrigia repens), ground ivy (Glechoma hederacea), yellow woodsorell (Oxalis stricta), buckhorn plantain (Plantago lanceolata), broadleaf plantain (Plantago major), dandelion (Taraxacum officinale),white clover (Trifolium repens), and violet. To help identify these weeds, visit njaes.rutgers.edu/weeds.
Perennial weeds may have rhizomes, stolons, crowns, nutlets, roots or entire plants that survive through the winter and resume growth again the following spring. They are the most difficult weeds to control since you need to remove the entire root system.
You can hand-dig with a trowel or a common device called a weed-popper if you don't want to use herbicides, but chemical control is often easier and more effective.
Excessive thatch: Normal de-thatching should be done in the fall when the thatch (spongy area of mostly dead rhizomes, or stems between crown and roots) is more than Â½-inch thick. If the thatch builds up to 2 inches or more, you may need to have a professional come in with heavy-duty equipment. Dig up a few areas of the turf to determine if the thatch is a problem.
Compacted soils: Test for extreme compaction when soils are slightly moist, a day or two after a light rain. If you can't get a screwdriver or garden trowel to penetrate the slightly moist soils, then you may have severe compaction.
Moderate soil compaction often can be handled with a core aerator in the early fall. Extreme compaction can be more problematic and may require the addition of quality topsoil and organic matter as well as the use of a professional-quality core aerator, aerifier or chisel device that can penetrate these soils.

Elspeth Thompson finds the seasonal heroes that yield a fragrant glory

2008-01-15T17:06:00.000-08:00

On one of the unseasonally sunny days over the New Year, I found a friend standing in my garden with a beatific smile on her face.

Delightfully delicate: Daphne bholua
She was transfixed, she said, by a delicious lily-like scent but couldn't imagine where it could be coming from at this time of the year. When I pointed out the sarcococca in the corner, she could hardly believe that such a strong heady fragrance could be coming from this small unassuming plant.
Sarcococca confusa is an evergreen bush with tiny tatters of white flowers that are really no more than a cluster of anthers hanging close to the stem. The pleasures it packs are olfactory, rather than visual, as is the case with many other flowers that bloom so heroically in these bleakest months of the year.
Sarcococca hookeriana is even more fragrant, and therefore more widespread, but its pink-tinged flowers are, to me, somewhat untidy, lacking the purity of S. confusa.
All sarcococcas grow well in shade, but they need to be kept moist. If your soil is too dry, try it in a large container by the kitchen door, where its scent can be appreciated and any waste vegetable water and so on can be put to good use.

Another lovely wintry plant whose scent is far stronger than the size of its flowers would suggest is the winter-flowering honeysuckle, Lonicera fragrantissima. This small twiggy shrub, with its delicate cream and white flowers, bears little physical resemblance to the climbing honeysuckles that are so popular in summer gardens.
But its perfume is wonderfully penetrating - just a few sprigs in a vase will scent an entire room and give a fillip to the spirits. I planted one beside the gate of our seaside house a few years ago, and what was little more than a twig in a pot has grown and flourished into a five-foot bush that I plan to prune and train around an arch across the entrance. (I've since learned that what I really should have planted is L. x purpusii 'Winter Beauty', which has an even stronger scent and a longer flowering period, from early December through till April.)
The downside of many of these winter beauties is that they are dead dull during the remaining months of the year, but the branches can easily play host to attractive scented climbers.
With a white Rosa rugosa on the other side of the arch and a summer jasmine scrambling overhead, it is my aim to welcome visitors with scented flowers all year round. Another unassuming favourite I planted at the same time has so far proved less of a success.
Wintersweet, or Chimonanthus praecox, has waxy, almost transparent flowers the colour of church candles and a perfume just like nectar. I fell in love with it in Cambridge University Botanic Garden when I was a student, and vowed to have it in my own garden one day.
There, wintersweet is placed in an island border, where the low morning and afternoon sun can illuminate the maroon-centred blooms like parchment from either side, and I tried to emulate this effect by planting it as part of an east-west-running hedge.
The trouble is, that though wintersweet prefers a sheltered spot, it needs the sun to penetrate and ripen the wood in summer in order to flower well, and by the summer my plant is somewhat swamped by its neighbours. Perhaps it's just a matter of patience, though.
Wintersweet is a notoriously slow grower, only flowering after several years' growth, but it is well worth the wait. I long for the day when I can wander outside and pick scented sprays to bring inside where the added warmth brings out the flowers' fragrance.
Last but not least when it comes to small winter flowers with show-stopping scent are the Daphnes. My favourite is the deciduous D.mezereum, whose bare branches are clothed in clusters of tiny four-petalled mauve stars from late winter to early spring - D. m. 'Bowles Variety' has pretty white flowers.
Of the other daphnes such as D.bholua and evergreen D. odora, many have a tricky reputation and must be placed in well-drained soil in a sheltered spot that receives some winter sun in order to be given a good chance. The greenish-yellow flowered D. laureola is frost-tolerant and rather interesting, while the popular D. odora 'Aureomarginata' has a cream-coloured edge to its evergreen leaves.
Again, Daphnes are good candidates for pots near doorways, provided the soil is well-drained but not allowed completely to dry out. When the flowers are over, feed for a few weeks with a good liquid fertilizer and move to a less prominent spot until next winter's brief moment of fragrant glory.
Tours offer
Readers dreaming of spring and summer can earn a discount on garden tours with two leaders in the field, by signing up within the next month.
Garden designer Karen Platt's tours for 2008 range from visits to some of Britain's best-loved gardens and flower shows, including Chelsea, to the horticultural highlights of Rome, Marrakech and Thailand, and also include a practical learning element.
She is offering 10 per cent off bookings made before 15 Feb. For more information see http://www.karenplatt.co.uk/ or call 0114 268 1700, quoting this offer.
Boxwood Tours, whose well-established garden tours are led by experts, are offering readers booking by that date £100 off trips this year to gardens in the heart of Spain, Calvados and the Cotentin Peninsula.

A SECOND PRIZE FOR PASSIONATE SNAPPER

2008-01-14T05:56:00.000-08:00

A Photographer for almost 40 years was proud to get first prize in the Four Seasons competition.Geoff Coolledge (61), of Enfield Avenue in New Waltham, said: "It's wonderful."I won once three years ago, and didn't think I would get the chance to do so a second time."I have been taking photographs for about 37 years now. It is a real passion of mine. I love going out, taking the picture, and then weighing up the quality of the photographs when I get back home."Geoff took the picture of the robin in November. He said: "The robin has been around since summer, living in next door's hedge."I saw him in our garden, and quickly opened the top window to our lounge and took the photograph with my Canon 20D camera."I was particularly pleased with the result - especially thanks to the rich colour of the flower."I tend to specialise in wildlife shots. One of my favourite places to go and take pictures is Cleethorpes Country Park."I also like to photograph aircraft - a particular favourite of mine is one I took of a Spitfire at the Elvington Air Show, near York."I will keep entering the Four Seasons competition."It's really rewarding to see a picture you have taken appearing in the paper."I remember when I used to be a tanker driver, I was surprised by the amount of colleagues coming up to me to say they had seen one my shots in the Grimsby Telegraph - it was quite amazing."

Just Ask: Wait for drier weather to work your soil

2008-01-13T16:29:00.000-08:00

Q: We are building a new house, and it is taking longer than expected. Right now the topsoil is scraped away, and the subsoil is compacted like cement from all the heavy equipment. This hard-packed soil does not drain well, and puddles sit around after it rains. Do you think we should bring in extra topsoil now to improve this situation or wait until spring?
-- J.B., e-mail
M.B.: Wait. Moving, working or tilling any soil during wet winter weather can damage the structure and air pockets. This may destroy the tilth or compact even the best topsoils. When the winter rains stop and you are done with heavy equipment, add topsoil high in organic matter. The more compost you can add to your compacted subsoil, the better. Organic matter is the great equalizer that both loosens compacted and clay soils and enriches sandy, loose soils, so that both can hold moisture but still allow for air and drainage. When soils like yours have already been compacted, you can save money with a design that takes poor drainage into consideration. Think raised beds and planting berms of topsoil with gravel paths and swales that can channel rainwater.

Q: I saw the coolest flower at a local florist, and I was told it is called a protea. I bought just one stem and enjoyed it indoors as a cut flower for weeks. The blossom was huge, unusual and colorful, and I want to grow this plant in my yard. Where can I find seeds or young plants?
-- T., e-mail
M.B.: Hold on to your dreams, but get your feet back on the ground, because protea is a beautiful but tropical plant that will not survive the winters in our Northwest climate. You would need a heated greenhouse and some skill to grow this heat-loving plant, which is native to Australia and Africa. To soothe your fever for a tropical touch, I suggest some winter-hardy shrubs with a jungle jingle, such as hardy hibiscus, bold-leaved cannas, bananas and colorful lantanas or the unusual Australian blooms from Eucomis bulbs (also called pineapple lily). These have been overwintering quite happily in Puget Sound area gardens, except when the temperature dips really low. If you want easy-to-grow houseplants with an exotic flair, check out the many types of bromeliads. Unlike the protea, bromeliads will adapt and bloom during the winter months despite the lack of a greenhouse. And you can always treat yourself to those fabulous cut proteas from the florist.
Q: We have a big old forsythia bush, and I would like to cut it back and get it under control. What would be the best time of year to do this?
-- L.M., Enumclaw
M.B.: Anytime the shears are sharp and in your hands. Forsythias are forgiving shrubs and will survive the most horrific haircuts, no matter when you prune them. I always like to suggest that forsythias and quince be pruned in January or early February, so that the cut branches can be brought indoors and placed in a tall vase of warm water. In a few days the bare whips will burst into bloom. Forcing forsythia each winter is a beautiful way to control the size of your shrub. Pruning after blooming also is recommended because the growth flush after the flowers fade will quickly cover up any pruning scars. But even if you prune your forsythia in summer or fall, the shrub will survive. However, it may pout a bit and punish you by withholding flowers for a year.

Sow ideas now for the summer garden

2008-01-12T01:38:00.000-08:00

It’s that dreamy time of year, when all things are possible in the garden. We page through seed catalogs or browse online and see a world of potential.
As you dream of the garden to come, consider new or unusual annuals that provide a season of color for the price of a seed packet.
Annuals are a great way to try something new or uncommon. They cost little and you invest only a year’s worth of time, because these plants will grow, flower, set seed and die by Christmas. (With luck, they may even reseed and come up the following year for you.)
So why not pick up a packet from Thompson & Morgan of the new poppy Papaver “Ooh La La”?
The pink, lavender, white or deep salmon flowers of “Ooh La La” are crammed with petals, making them look much like a peony. Stems grow to 3 feet for a fine vertical element in the garden.
Contrast those big fat flowers with the delicate structure of an uncommon love-in-mist, Nigella papillosa “White Bride’s Veil,” available from Renee’s Garden.
The pure white petals are a perfect backdrop for the intricate, black pistil and stamen structure that sits atop. The ferny foliage — much like that of the more common, but still fine, love-in-a-mist (Nigella damascena) — adds a softness.
Both the uncommon and the everyday Nigella develop cool-looking, inflated seedpods that work as a season-extender in the garden, good texture in a dried indoor arrangement and insurance for more flowers next year.
New introductions of annuals are different takes on a familiar plant. Sunflowers, zinnias and marigolds come to us with more petals or strangely arranged petals, taller or shorter plants and a wider variety of colors, even if those color differences are only slight.
Sunflowers (Helianthus annuus) are old friends — easy to grow and fun for kids and squirrels alike. Variations on the usual theme of golden yellow flowers with large dark brown centers may be slight, but still enough to interest us to try them out.
“Green Heart” from Thompson & Morgan replaces the brown centers with lime on 5-foot-high plants. If you’re looking for a shorter sunflower, try “Sunny Smile” from Territorial Seed Co.; it grows to only 20 inches.
“Starburst Panache,” also from Territorial, offers 5-inch-wide flowers with dark center disks surrounded by a ruffle of golden petals. The plants branch, which provides more flowers.
Sunflower competitions — how high can it grow? — should include “Heirloom Titan” from Renee’s Garden. It can top out at 14 feet, so plant it against a fence or wall, where it will be easy to install some support for the stems.
Cosmos, another familiar annual, takes on subtly different characteristics in new introductions. The usual pink pinwheel flowers deepen in Thompson & Morgan’s “Antiquity.” The flowers begin burgundy and then age to a deep salmon.
Plants such as cosmos and poppies have tiny seeds and are perfect choices for the scatter-approach to gardening. In early spring, sprinkle a whole seed packet out onto soil that has been scuffed up a bit. Make sure we’re getting the usual spring showers, and you’re set.
Other annuals have chunkier seeds, and need to be put into the soil; this includes sunflowers and nasturtiums (Tropaeolum majus). The seeds of nasturtiums, another cheery flower that’s a cinch to grow, are round and knobby, like a dried caper.
“Ladybird,” a new Thompson & Morgan nasturtium, is named not for our former first lady, but for the British term for ladybugs. On each petal of the golden yellow flowers is a red dot.
From cheery to dramatic — the intense colors and shadings of the painted tongue (Salpiglossis sinuata) prompt questions and admiring comments from garden visitors. Often, the only way you can get Salpiglossis seeds is to buy a mix of colors, but this year Thompson & Morgan and Mr. Fothergill’s Seed offer “Kew Blue.”
Intense purple-blue flowers with a black throat bloom atop stems that grow up to 2½ feet tall. A clump of one color makes a strong statement, and this color is hard to be had in the summer garden.
Save room for another dark beauty: Scabiosa atropurpurea “Ace of Spades.” We are more familiar with the perennial Scabiosa, with medium light-blue pincushion flowers, but this is an annual.
“Ace of Spades” flowers are deep maroon with tiny white “pins” stuck in a center cushion. The plants grow to 3 feet high and will surely cause a stir.
Marty Wingate, a Washington state master gardener, is the author of two garden books.

Garden advice: Thorny problems

2008-01-11T03:28:00.000-08:00

Garden tips and advice from our resident expert Helen Yemm. This week: seascape gardens, weed control and a 'sad case'

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The tide has turned
Amid all the busy pre-Christmas hoo-hah a slightly tetchy-sounding reader felt moved to object, on the Telegraph website, to me wishing others "seasonal jollity" - a term he obviously regards as too PC by half.

Seaside style: A moden seaside garden
I must say I, too can get a bit tetchy in that run-up to Christmas, although for different reasons: I can't stand the sight of my messy garden and, given a daily invasion of airborne oak leaves that continues for two months or more, there is no incentive to do anything resembling a clear-up.
However, everything changes with the almost imperceptible lengthening of the days and the undoubted frisson provided by that first mild, blue-skied afternoon of the New Year. It was no surprise that I found myself touring the garden looking for signs of life amid the mess and, with a song thrush trilling away in the offending oak tree, the re-bonding process got under way.
My first flurry of activity involved cutting down the last ratty remains of border perennials, leaving 10cm (4in) stumps as an aide-mémoire. Then, on my hands and knees, I carefully removed the drifts of now-clammy autumn leaves that had become wedged around them, revealing and dispatching as I did so small black slugs already moving in on the premature green shoots beneath.
As I progressed through my borders bagging the debris, accompanied by a daftly brave and sweetly twittering robin, I eased up the compacted soil surface with the fine tines of my little shrub rake, careful not to disturb the daffodils and snowdrops already shoving their noses upwards.
Too idle to consistently label groups of bulbs, I have learnt the hard way (by too often shoving a trowel through them) that it is sensible at least to mark their whereabouts with unobtrusive drifts of wooden kebab sticks, and to keep a list of varieties planted.
Thus this pre-spring border-trawl, apart from being a much-needed clean-up operation, served to remind me what to expect in the coming weeks.
Next, mindful that such mild and sunny afternoons are bound to be followed by an Arctic blast, I dug out the contents of a leaf heap (made in autumn 2006 and already pretty well broken down, thanks to the leaves having been shredded before composting), and spread it around.
The bases of the newly cleaned up perennials each got a dollop, especially the oriental hybrid hellebores that were now relieved of last year's untidy foliage and already shoving up their fresh new leaves and flower heads.
There was still more to do. I generally set myself a target of pruning my climbing roses as soon after the New Year as possible. And if I don't cut back my grapevine by the middle of the month, I may find that the powerful sap has already started to rise and the result will be shoots dripping alarmingly.
I finished off my glorious few hours in the garden by shredding my prunings, sweeping the paths and neatening the edge of my poor down-trodden lawn.
The whole place looked lovely and, as the light faded I went indoors feeling re-energised and looking forward to another gardening year - whatever the weather may chuck at us before spring arrives. The way I felt made that contentious term "seasonal jollity" suddenly seem particularly apt.
Seascape garden
We moved to the Isle of Wight 18 months ago, to a new Barratt house with a small open-plan front garden. We are both elderly and my husband is disabled, so we would like to create a genuinely low-maintenance area. We thought a "seascape" garden with grasses, sea campion and lavender would be suitable, but wonder whether it would be better to put the plants in pots rather than plant in the gravel. Mrs. E W Smith, East Cowes
The pictures you sent me were of a neat gravelled area (previously just grass and dwarf conifers) with a paved path. The "seascape" idea is a clever one.
You could plant straight into the gravel if that gravel was originally laid directly on top of the previously weed-killed lawn, or if there is simply a membrane between the gravel and the old lawn soil beneath. But if the gravel had been put down on a layer of compacted hardcore, this would make planting into it impossible without major upheaval, so you would indeed need to use containers.
However, since you sought my advice… I do not find a garden comprised of single potted specimens genuinely low-maintenance. The watering can be a year-round chore, the plants need re-potting and replacing and it can also look scrappy and un-coordinated unless the pots are carefully chosen and subtly grouped.

Dorit Baxter Tells How to Outsmart Skin Care Industry Hype, Avoid High Prices

2008-01-10T05:11:00.000-08:00

Dorit Baxter, founder and owner of New York Day Spa, located in midtown Manhattan, calls the increasingly hyped and expensive contemporary skin care market "deception in a jar."

Declaring that "consumers in pursuit of a perfect skin and the myth of forever young fall into a trap of promises presented in beautiful packages whose contents deliver disappointing results," Baxter offers the following smart-shopping tips to confused consumers:
Research the labels of high-priced items, then find budget-friendly counterparts containing the same essential ingredients
Ignore manufacturers' advice to stick to only one product line in your beauty regimen, feel free to mix and match as much as you like
Avoid products like Retin A whose wrinkle-diminishing properties are unsubstantiated, and which does not come in a low-priced alternativeBaxter applies the same skepticism and practicality to skin care treatments, advising consumers not to fall for the hype that foists on the public every new fad boasting results defying common sense. She does not believe that Microdermabrasion sufficiently lives up to its promise of perfecting the skin to justify its expense, requisite repeated procedures and the risk of rendering the derma excessively vulnerable to environmental factors.
When it comes to the relentlessly hyped Botox, Baxter argues that the costly injections, which also require frequent repeats, do not produce rejuvenating effects on a level to justify the expenditure of money and time, and to incur the risks to the visage inherent in the injections.
Encouraging a simplified beauty regimen, Baxter maintains that for the typical woman, a facial cleansing and moisturizing agent will suffice. She cautions women who are experiencing a backlash against aggressive skin care marketing not to go overboard and stop using moisturizers, which she defines "as necessary to the skin as water is to a flower. I have seen their effectiveness in my spa clients over an entire generation."
For further discussion on avoiding persistent hype and high prices in skin care products and treatments, please contact Dorit Baxter directly.
About Dorit BaxterA Manhattan-based skin care specialist for over three decades, Baxter launched in 1989 one of America's first day spas, which was featured in Time Magazine (July 22, 1991) as the prototype for an establishment catering to the convenience of busy urbanites seeking beautifying and wellness-promoting treatments in close proximity to home and office. New York Day Spa was an original promoter of Dead Sea skin care products in the U.S. and an early exemplifier of multi-cultural beauty concepts. A trend-setter rather than follower, Dorit Baxter has consistently influenced the spa industry with her visions and innovations in body treatments and facials as she has done for the past 28 years in business.
Contact:Dorit BaxterDorit Baxter New York Day Spa212-371-4542http://www.newyorkdayspa.com/

Q&A with Sandy Feather: Finicky gardenias like moisture, cold temperatures

2008-01-05T16:06:00.000-08:00

Q: I received a big, beautiful gardenia as a gift for Thanksgiving. It was just full of buds, with a few open blooms. Much to my disappointment, most of those buds have dropped off before they got a chance to open. What am I doing wrong?

A: Gardenias have a reputation for being finicky houseplants, so don't be so hard on yourself. Your gift was probably produced in a greenhouse where it received the right amount of light, was grown at the proper temperature, and maintained on a careful watering and fertilization schedule. Some of the bud drop can probably be attributed just to the move from that greenhouse into your home.
Two of the biggest factors influencing gardenia bud drop are heat and lack of humidity in our homes, especially in the winter. They prefer cool temperatures -- 62 or 63 degrees -- to set and maintain flower buds. That is much cooler than most humans find comfortable in winter months. If temperatures get even a little too high, they will drop all of their buds. If you have a room where it stays cooler than the rest of your house while meeting the gardenia's other requirements, that may be best location for it.
Gardenias also require a high level of humidity or they drop their flower buds before they open. High humidity can be challenging to achieve in our homes during the winter when furnaces are running. Some gardeners report success by moving the plant to a naturally more humid room such as a bathroom or laundry area. You can stand the container in a saucer of pebbles that you keep filled with water to increase humidity. Try not to allow the bottom of the pot to contact the water in the saucer to avoid problems with root rot.
You may also group plants together. As the plants lose moisture through their leaves (transpiration), it maintains an area of higher humidity around the group. As a last resort, mist the leaves every other day. Too much moisture on the leaves can cause leaf spots, and moisture will spoil the flowers too quickly once they do bloom.
Gardenias prefer bright light, perhaps in an east- or southeast-facing window. Strong sun from the southwest may scorch their leaves and cause flowers to fade faster than necessary.

Q: I grew my own vegetable transplants for the first time last year. I think I started some seeds too early because I wound up with out-of-control tomato and cucumber plants. What is the best time to start different crops?

A: The most common mistake people make when growing their own transplants is starting them too early. The transplants get too big and woody by the time you are ready to set them out in the garden, and they do not adapt as well as less mature transplants.
As a rule of thumb, start your cool-season crops from mid- February to early March. These are crops that grow best in cool weather, but bolt to seed and/or get bitter during hot weather. Start cole crops such as broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, Chinese cabbage and kohlrabi eight to nine weeks before you want to plant them out in the garden. Start iceberg and romaine lettuce about four weeks before transplanting them into the garden.
Other types of lettuce such as leaf or butterhead are best seeded directly into the garden. Cool-season crops can be planted outside early to mid-April, as the weather warms and the soil dries out enough to work.
Warm-season crops -- those that are not planted out in the garden until all danger of frost has passed in late May -- should not be started indoors until late March or early April. Give tomatoes, peppers and eggplants eight to nine weeks before you want to plant them in the garden. If you start your cucumbers, melons and gourds indoors (they, too, can be direct-seeded in the garden), start them four weeks before planting them in the garden.
Otherwise, they get too big and take up too much valuable space under the lights.

Flowers farmers expect market bloom

2008-01-03T16:27:00.000-08:00

VietNamNet Bridge – Flower farming villages in the Mekong Delta are busily preparing for the upcoming lunar New Year. Thanks to favorable weather, yellow apricot gardens in the delta promise a vibrant and punctual bloom.

Tan Quy Dong Ward, Ward 3 and Tan Khanh Dong commune, in Dong Thap province, are the country’s flower hubs. Ba Dung, a farmer in Tan Khanh Dong, wakes every day at 5am and manages his gardens.

Dung said he planted 4,000 rose bushes for Tet and is now, through a special process, ensuring they bloom in time for Tet.

Tran Thi Thuy Phuong, the owner of a flower garden near Dung’s, said “For the past month, my entire family has been in the garden all day looking after flowers. We will be even busier as Tet gets nearer.”

Like Dung and Phuong, all flower growers in Sa Dec Town are very busy. Each family grows thousands of flowers.

In Cho Lach district, Ben Tre province, flowers are in bloom everywhere. Nguyen Van Van, the owner of a daisy garden in Long Thoi commune, Cho Lach district said: “Last year we suffered losses because of dry weather, which killed daisies. This year the weather is perfect. I think this year’s harvest will be both bountiful and beautiful.”

Farmers in Cho Lack district are preparing ornamental trees, as well as flowers, which are cut into animal shapes for the upcoming holiday.

Duong Van Huyen, Chairman of the Cai Mon Ornamental Tree Cooperative said: “Animal-shaped ornamental trees sell very well. We have just sold two 2.5m ornamental trees in the shape of stags for VND10 million. We expect trees to sell like hot cakes.”

Nguyen Van Cong, famous for making animal shaped ornamental trees in Cho Lach, said: “We work both day and night but still can’t meet the demand, but I guess that’s a good thing.”

Cong said many people want to buy Rat-shaped trees because this is the Year of the Rat.

Le Van Don, Vice Head of the Economics Division of Cho Lach District, said that the district’s farmers supply around 6 million flowers for Tet each year and expects prosperity this year, thanks to comfortable weather.

As yellow apricot is the symbol of Tet in the South, this kind of tree is paid special attention. Nguyen Thanh Quy in Cho Lach district, said he has invested over VND200 million in nearly 7,000 yellow apricot trees. Nguyen Quoc Viet in Sa Dec Town is also growing 2,000 yellow apricot trees. The two farmers said they will begin selling in late January.

Yellow apricot tree growers are using special methods that will make them bloom during Tet. They said this year they don’t worry about incurring losses because the planting area in Thu Duc district, HCM City has a weak crop this year because of high tides; they also expect prices to be higher than normal.

Some farmers said traders from HCM City, the central region and the North have come to buy yellow apricot trees.

However, some flower farmers say this year input expenditures have soared since the price for fertilizer, gas and other materials has increase substantially; meaning production costs are 30-50% higher than last year.

The Grounded Gardener: Sow ideas now for the summer garden

2008-01-02T15:36:00.000-08:00

It's that dreamy time of year, when all things are possible in the garden. We page through seed catalogs or browse online and see a world of potential.
As you dream of the garden to come, consider new or unusual annuals that provide a season of color for just the price of a seed packet.

The pure white petals of Nigella 'White Bride's Veil' are a perfect backdrop for the intricate, black pistil and stamen structure.
Annuals are a great way to try something new or uncommon. They cost little and you invest only a year's worth of time, because these plants will grow, flower, set seed and die by next Christmas. (With luck, they may even reseed and come up the following year for you.)
So why not pick up a packet from Thompson & Morgan of the new poppy Papaver 'Ooh La La' (we're told Ciscoe Morris had nothing to do with it).
The pink, lavender, white or deep salmon flowers of 'Ooh La La' are crammed with petals, making them look much like a peony. Stems grow to 3 feet for a fine vertical element in the garden.
Contrast those big fat flowers with the delicate structure of an uncommon love-in-mist, Nigella papillosa 'White Bride's Veil,' available from Renee's Garden.
The pure white petals are a perfect backdrop for the intricate, black pistil and stamen structure that sits atop. The ferny foliage -- much like that of the more common, but still fine, love-in-a-mist (Nigella damascena) -- adds a softness.
Both the uncommon and the everyday Nigella develop cool-looking, inflated seedpods that work as a season-extender in the garden, good texture in a dried indoor arrangement and insurance for more flowers next year.
New introductions of annuals are different takes on a familiar plant. Sunflowers, zinnias and marigolds come to us with more petals or strangely arranged petals, taller or shorter plants and a wider variety of colors, even if those color differences are only slight.
Sunflowers (Helianthus annuus) are old friends -- easy to grow and fun for kids and squirrels alike. Variations on the usual theme of golden yellow flowers with large dark brown centers may be slight, but still enough to interest us to try them out.
'Green Heart' from Thompson & Morgan replaces the brown centers with lime on 5-foot-high plants. If you're looking for a shorter sunflower, try 'Sunny Smile' from Territorial Seed Co.; it grows to only 20 inches.
'Starburst Panache,' also from Territorial, offers 5-inch-wide flowers with dark center disks surrounded by a ruffle of golden petals. The plants branch, which provides more flowers.
Sunflower competitions -- how high can it grow? -- should include 'Heirloom Titan' from Renee's Garden. It can top out at 14 feet, so plant it against a fence or wall, where it will be easy to install some support for the stems.
Cosmos, another familiar annual, takes on subtly different characteristics in new introductions. The usual pink pinwheel flowers deepen in Thompson & Morgan's 'Antiquity.' The flowers begin burgundy and then age to a deep salmon.
Plants such as cosmos and poppies have tiny seeds and are perfect choices for the scatter-approach to gardening. In early spring, sprinkle a whole a seed packet out onto soil that has been scuffed up a bit. Make sure we're getting the usual spring showers, and you're set.
Other annuals have chunkier seeds, and need to be put into the soil; this includes sunflowers and nasturtiums (Tropaeolum majus). The seeds of nasturtiums, another cheery flower that's a cinch to grow, are round and knobby, like a dried caper.
'Ladybird,' a new Thompson & Morgan nasturtium, is named not for our former first lady, but for the British term for ladybugs. On each petal of the golden yellow flowers is a red dot.
From cheery to dramatic -- the intense colors and shadings of the painted tongue (Salpiglossis sinuata) prompt questions and admiring comments from garden visitors. Often, the only way you can get Salpiglossis seeds is to buy a mix of colors, but this year Thompson & Morgan and Mr. Fothergill's Seed offer 'Kew Blue.'
Intense purple-blue flowers with a black throat bloom atop stems that grow up to 2 1/2 feet tall. A clump of one color makes a strong statement, and this color is hard to be had in the summer garden.
Save room for another dark beauty: Scabiosa atropurpurea 'Ace of Spades.' We are more familiar with the perennial Scabiosa, with medium light-blue pincushion flowers, but this is an annual.
'Ace of Spades' flowers are deep maroon with tiny white "pins" stuck in a center cushion. The plants grow to 3 feet high and will surely cause a stir.
SOURCES
Buy seeds directly from the company, or shop at your local nursery. Some nurseries fill whole walls with seed packets, beginning early in the year, providing us with delightfully difficult choices.
Thompson & Morgan -- tmseeds.com; 800-274-7333
Territorial Seed Co. -- territorialseed.com; 800-626-0866
Nichols Garden Nursery -- nicholsgardennursery.com; 800-422-3985
Renee's Garden -- reneesgarden.com; 888-880-7228
Mr. Fothergill's Seed and Gourmet Seed International -- gourmetseed.com; 575-398-6111
Marty Wingate, a Master Gardener, is the author of two garden books. She can be contacted at: martywin@earthlink.net.

Purdue Garden Calendar

2007-12-26T05:58:00.000-08:00

Keep holiday poinsettias and other plants near a bright window. Water as top of soil becomes dry.
Increase humidity around houseplants by grouping plants together, placing them on a pebblewater tray or running a humidifier.
Check stored produce and tender flower bulbs and roots for rot, shriveling or excess moisture. Remove and discard damaged material.
Repot houseplants as they outgrow current pots. YARD (Lawns, woody ornamentals and fruits)
Check young trees for rodent injury on lower trunks. Prevent injury with hardware cloth or protective collars.
Keep road and sidewalk salt away from plants. Construct a screen of burlap, if necessary, to keep salt spray off plants.
"Leaf" through nursery catalogs and make plans for landscape and home orchard additions. Order plants early for best selection.
Early spring-flowering trees and shrubs, such as forsythia, crabapple, flowering quince, flowering dogwood and honeysuckle, can be forced for early indoor blooms by placing cut branches in water in a warm location. GARDEN (Flowers, vegetables and small fruits)
Send for seed catalogs for the garden.
Sketch your garden plans on paper, including what to grow, spacing, arrangement and number of plants needed.
Order seeds and plants as early as possible for best selection.
Wood ashes from the fireplace can be spread in the garden, but don't overdo it. Wood ashes increase soil pH, and excess application can make some nutrients unavailable for plant uptake. Have soil tested to be certain of the pH before adding wood ash.

In the Sackler Atrium, Modern Ideas in Full Flower

2007-12-24T15:35:00.000-08:00

In the normal course of things, there are two good reasons for lingering in the sunny atrium of the Smithsonian's Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, down on the south side of the Mall. There's the huge arrangement of exotic flowers that greets you as you come in, and the installation of contemporary Asian art that you encounter further on. One of those two reasons isn't there right now, but it's hard to say which one. The official art program may be on temporary hold, but that's let the flowers morph into a wall-filling installation that's so ambitious, it's hardly fair to call it an "arrangement" anymore. It's closer to contemporary sculpture. Since 1997, Smithsonian horticulturalist Cheyenne Kim has been in sole charge of greeting visitors with flowers, using a special fund established by Else Sackler, wife of the museum's founder. Kim was born in Japan in 1941, and he trained in the traditional craft of ikebana.

Palace that melts in your mouth

2007-12-22T15:57:00.000-08:00

All you need to do is take a slice — and let it melt in your mouth.
Welcome to Bangalore Palace, a 4.5 tonne cake made of sugar that went on display yesterday at a city school. The 62.5-foot-long, 20-foot-high and 19.5-foot-wide creation, exhibited by Nilgiris bakers and confectioners, is modelled on Britain’s Windsor Castle and took three months to prepare.
Twenty-five men laboured to give the finishing touches to the brown-and-white sweet monster, the 33rd edition of sugar-and-cake creations Bangaloreans have been treated to nearly every Christmas over the past several decades.
“We did not have the exhibition for the last two years. As a large number of people have been asking us reasons for not having it, we decided to have it this year,” says C. Ramachandran, the architect and chief mason.
Ramachandran used to run Nilgiris, Bangalore’s favourite bakers and confectioners, till he handed over the reins to younger family members.
The business has grown from a small dairy farm outlet in 1905 to one that includes ready-to-eat packaged food, bread, milk products, a supermarket chain and a restaurant.
The annual cake exhibition started in 1969 and has drawn around four lakh visitors every year.
“The colours are also safe and edible,” says one of the bakers involved in making the cake, which will be open to the public till December 31 at St Joseph’s Indian High School.
All the panels, walls, balconies, parapets, domes and forecourt of the cake, a replica of the original Bangalore Palace which itself is modelled on Windsor Castle, are edible. But it has to be kept at 40 degrees Celsius throughout the period of the exhibition so that it does not wither away.
There are smaller models called Santa Villa, Ship, Kiddies Wheel, Jurassic Park, Clock, Cinderella Coach, Flower Arrangement, Peacock and Veena, which lucky raffle winners can take away.
The show has made it to the Limca Book of Records but hasn’t yet found a mention in the Guinness World Records — because there is no category under which it can be put.
But Bangaloreans shouldn’t mind. This is one cake they can have and eat too — year after year.

Growing pains

2007-12-21T15:55:00.000-08:00

The creation of the English garden in the 18th and 19th centuries is often associated with the "great men" involved: garden designers such as William Kent, Lancelot "Capability" Brown and Humphry Repton. But Toby Musgrave has written a revisionist history of a forgotten profession: that of the head gardener. These were the people who actually laboured to grow thousands of annuals, who mixed secret recipes of manure to create verdant lawns, and who engineered fountains and lakes.

Life as a gardener started at about the age of 12, and apprenticeship usually lasted as many years. To learn their trade, boys washed flowerpots or stoked the boilers in the hothouses for more than 10 hours a day, six days a week, while studying the latest horticultural publications in the evenings. One Andrew Turnbull, for example, learned every night some 50 new plant names, in order to be allowed to work in the flower garden. Most of the apprentices and gardeners lived in abysmal conditions. Some of the so-called "bothies" were, as one horticultural writer complained, "very uncomfortable hovels" - cold, gloomy and unsuitable for human habitation. The wages were also low, even compared to other badly paid trades, and worst of all the boys had to bribe the head gardener with an annual "fee" to take them on at all.
Musgrave is particularly evocative when describing the education and daily work of the gardener in the 19th century - shovelling manure on frosty December days, with "sweat dripping off my nose like peas", as described by a David Thomson. At Bicton in Derbyshire, the gardeners were fined threepence if they arrived in a dirty shirt or if their shoes were not properly tied, and fourpence if they were "found gathering fruit with unwashed hands".
What is missing in The Head Gardeners, however, is an examination of what motivated these men to endure the hardship of the long apprenticeship, despite the prospect of lifelong penury and ever more demanding physical labour. There is little about the passion that drove them - that all-encompassing urge to grow, create, experiment and to improve (the soil, the technology, the plants, but also their station in life).
An example for this is Musgrave's case study of the greatest and most famous of all head gardeners, Joseph Paxton at Chatsworth, in the 19th century. His relationship with his employer, the Duke of Devonshire, was extraordinary, as it changed from servitude to deep mutual friendship. Paxton moved from mere employee to friend, companion and financial adviser. He travelled with the duke to France, Italy and Constantinople, seeing more art, architecture and cultural landmarks than many aristocrats. Back home, Paxton's sheer determination, combined with his horticultural and technological genius, made the duke "drunk with Chatsworth" - consequently spending more money on his garden than anybody else at the time. Paxton eventually used his knowledge and experience with the glasshouses at Chatsworth as inspiration for the Crystal Palace at the Great Exhibition in 1851, and thereby became both famous and rich.
However, despite this amazing story of friendship and obsession, Musgrave organises this section rigidly according to Chatsworth's garden features ("rockwork", "pinetum", "glasshouses" and so on). This destroys the narrative, which should surely have been driven by the irresistible relationship between Paxton and the duke and their ambitions.
Musgrave does succeed, however, in demonstrating how many of the gardeners became enormously accomplished, executing the grand ideas of famous landscape architects, which were often provided only as a sketch. They not only laid out these complex designs but also mass-produced tender exotics and pineapples in all seasons, built glass-houses, improved the soil, organised their staff and cajoled their employers. They were horticulturists, mathematicians, engineers, chemists, botanists and managers at the same time. Many also played a central role in disseminating the new horticultural knowledge. Philip Miller, as the head gardener at the Chelsea Physic Garden in the 18th century, was the first to publish a gardening encyclopedia which was based on observation and experiments instead of plant lore and myth - it was the mother of all plant dictionaries.
Others founded horticultural magazines or wrote books and articles, sharing their experience with professionals and amateurs. Some even ruled their employers: Thomas King, of Devizes Castle in Wiltshire, grew only flowers he liked, ignoring his employer's wishes. Samuel Barker, of Clumber Park in Nottinghamshire, went so far as to write threatening letters when the owner dared to pick and eat "his" prized grapes without asking for permission.
· Andrea Wulf is the co-author of This Other Eden. Seven Great Gardens and 300 Years of English History, published by Little, Brown.

Christmas Flower Power

2007-12-20T16:21:00.000-08:00

There is a beautiful flower native to Mexico where a legend is told on it’s behalf. The story is of a poor girl named Maria and her little brother, Pablo. The two loved the annual Mexican Christmas festival with its large manger scene, but each year were disappointed that they had no money to buy a gift for the baby Jesus. One Christmas Eve, Maria and Pablo stopped on their way to the church to pick some weeds growing along the roadside to give to the baby Jesus. The other children laughed at them for their gift, but Maria and Pablo knew their gift was from the heart. As they began to place their plants around the manger, the green-top leaves miraculously turned into bright red petals. Soon the manger was surrounded by beautiful star-shaped flowers and became known as Flores de Noche Buena - Flowers of the Holy Night - the first Poinsettias. This beautiful legend accompanying the plant was introduced to the United States by Dr. J.R. Poinsett who was the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico from 1825-1829 who was also a keen botanist and gardener. It is from him that we get the Americanized name of the plant. Poinsettias are amazing plants! You have probably guessed by now that if I am writing an article about them then they probably have some healing properties to them but did you know that Poinsettias represent over 85 percent of the potted plant sales during the holiday season? And that $220 million worth of poinsettias are sold during a 6 week period from November to December?! In fact, it is such a popular plant that December 12 is National Poinsettia day! And there is even an NCCA Bowl game in San Diego named the Poinsettia Bowl! That probably makes it one of the most recognized and popular herbs in the world despite the lack of knowledge of it’s medicinal properties. So what are it’s medicinalproperties you may ask? Well the leaves are commonly used in Mexico as a cathartic (an agent used to purge the bowels, a mild laxative) and an emetic (an agent used to induce vomiting) and a tea made of the small, barely there, yellow flowers found in the center of the leaves (1Tbsp of fresh flowers or 1 tsp of dried to 1 cup of water) will promote the secretion of milk in lactating women. The flowers bloom during the shortest days of the year right around Christmas. Another rather unique medicinal trait comes from the plants milky sap. It contains chemicals capable of temporarily removing unwanted hair. However some people can be mildly allergic to this sap and it may produce a slight rash or reddening of the skin so try it in a small area first. Many people believe that poinsettia’s are poisonous to children and pets however this is incorrect. In the 1970’s Ohio State University conducted a study on rats. They fed 160 rats large amounts of the plant in order to establish the plants oral toxicity rate (the amount needed to induce death). The rats were fed up to 22.5 grams of the plant and no deaths occurred. That is the same as a 50-pound child eating 500-600 leaves! That is about 15 full sized plants! The most likely event to preclude ingesting that many leaves would be a tummy ache or if you are lucky, vomiting and I assure you that would be a welcome event after that many leaves! Besides isn’t that one of it’s medicinal properties anyway? Poinsettias truly are a Christmas plant for once the holiday season is over your beautiful red plant will go dormant and lose it’s leaves and that’s when most of them find their way to the trash can. Howeveryou can easily trim the branches and find a cool place to store it until the last frost is gone and then plant it in the ground or in a bigger pot and lengthen it’s herbal life! (It needs slightly acid soil anda protected location. Fertilize once a month for best color.) In return your plant will forever return the favor in offering you it’s medicinal healing powers. After all it’s your health!The Hurricane Valley Journal does not endorse any medical treatment or guarantee its effectiveness in treating medical conditions. Please consult your health care provider for questions regarding your health or before trying any medical treatment.

National records announced at Flower Festival

2007-12-19T17:02:00.000-08:00

VietNamNet Bridge – The Vietnam Record Book Center recognized eight new national records at the Flower Festival 2007 on Tuesday in the resort city of Da Lat, Lam Dong Province.

The eight included: the largest procession of Santa Clauses, 200; the largest timber-made wine barrel; the largest pair of tea boxes; a stone block with the signatures of 100 newly married couples; the largest pair of candles; the largest number of wedding cars serving a wedding party; the largest wedding photo; and the longest wedding gown.

At the Flower Festival, Vinacafe Company also presented a giant cup of coffee, which has registered with Guinness World Record organization.

These records were introduced to visitors in a procession along the Xuan Huong Lake.

Last night, a performance named “Extraordinary men from three regions” attracted thousands who came to see strange performances by famous Vietnamese artists and record setters, including: Mac Can, Ho Kieng, Tong Son, Nguyen Van Dieu, Phan Thanh Tien, Nguyen Quang Hien and Tang Ky Quang.

God picked a flower

2007-12-18T15:12:00.000-08:00

When my mom isn't invoking the Holy Spirit during her daily routine, she prays to St. Therese of Lisieux whenever things get heavy: "Little Flower, show your power in this hour."St. Therese saw the seasons as reflective of God's love for us. She loved flowers and saw herself as the "little flower of Jesus," who gave glory to God by just being herself among all the other flowers in God's garden.

Mom is 84 and not prone to much nonsense. So when she tells me this brings her stress relief and spiritual wisdom, I believe her. Besides, I'll try anything, especially during the holiday season when stress is the order of the day.No matter what, we all experience an entire range of emotions as we muddle our way through life. Sometimes particular feelings are more pronounced than others. Sure, one tries to be prepared, but mostly we try to take things as they come, deal with them as well as we can, then just plant the seeds of our best intentions and watch them grow (or not) in God's garden.The death last week of Nogalian Ramon Insunza dealt many of us who knew him a crushing blow to the heart. Many came to know him during his years of dedication to the local youth soccer group. Or maybe he was the man folks called for their pest-control service.Once I allowed myself to grieve and reflect I consoled myself, thinking maybe God needed someone to fumigate his garden, or a coach for AYSO (Angel Youth Soccer Organization), or simply an unassuming kind-hearted man he knew would listen to Him whenever He needed to unload.Ramon's friend, Frank Martinez said, "He would coach, referee and run the league not only on game day but daily volunteering for over 20 years - no pay, some thanks, but not enough. He took criticism in stride and his favorite word was, "Gracias."Like Martinez said, his family should take comfort and be "very proud for sharing him with the rest of us."If my mom is right, St Therese and the Holy Spirit will help them resign themselves and heal from their painful loss.

Flower show leads to Chiang Mai price war

2007-12-16T16:52:00.000-08:00

Hoteliers in Chiang Mai foresee no end to the price war that has resulted from an oversupply of rooms that arose ahead of the Royal Flora Ratchaphruek 2006 exposition. The northern province currently has an estimated 25,000 hotel rooms, compared with 17,000 before the three-month international horticultural exposition opened in November 2006. Most of the rooms are budget and middle-scale hotels, according to data from the Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT).
Another 500 to 600 rooms are due to open in the first quarter of next year with the completion of new five-star hotels, according to Phairoj Suksundee, the director of sales for the Holiday Inn Chiang Mai.
He said the problem was compounded by the conversion of some serviced apartments to accommodate daily guests and thus functioning like hotels.
The oversupply is expected to continue, and as result, hoteliers are slashing prices to draw business. Room rates at three-star hotels range from 1,500 to 2,300 baht per night this year and would be at least 1,600 to 2,500 baht next year, said Mr Phairoj.
To cope with the problem, Mr Phairoj said Holiday Inn was focusing on the international meetings, events, exhibitions and conferences market and niche markets such as corporate and incentive domestic travel to expand its Thai customer base from 20% to 25% next year.
The hotel also is wooing visitors from the Middle East, who are finding it more difficult to travel in Europe because of security issues, and are turning to Southeast Asia. Middle Eastern visitors tend to travel from June to September, which could help fill rooms during the low tourism season in Thailand.
Mr Phairoj said the main rivals to Thailand for Middle Eastern tourists were Singapore and Malaysia.
He said next year hoteliers would face more heavy competition, particularly among mid-market and budget properties. At the same time, five-star and upscale hotels must cut unnecessary costs and be alert to new rivals.
In the low season from May to September of this year, the hotel occupancy rate in Chiang Mai averaged below 50%. The rate is expected to average 70% in the high season from October to next April, said Junnapong Saranak, the director of the TAT's Northern Region 1 office.
This year, he expects that Chiang Mai will welcome a total of 4.2 million visitors, with an increase to 4.5 million next year. He forecast that by the end of this year, tourism-related business will generate revenue of 40 billion baht for the province, up from 39 billion last year.
Mr Junnapong said that two five-star hotels operated by big global hotel chains would open next year. They will help to promote the province through global networks

Da Lat flower festival to offer free wine

2007-12-14T03:38:00.000-08:00

More than 8,000 liters of free wine will be served at the Da Lat Flower Festival later this month.
The wine party, sponsored by four local beverage companies, will be held on December 20 the Central Highlands’ most famous resort town.
Vu Van Tu, director of the Lam Dong Province Trade and Tourism Promotion Center, said free libations would be available to all in attendance.
Lam Dong Foodstuffs Joint Stock Company, Da Lat Beverage Joint Stock Company, Vinh Tien Company Limited and Cau Dat Tea Factory will supply 2,000 liters of wine each.
Seven nations, including the Netherlands, the Republic of Korea, China, Japan, Thailand, Belgium and Denmark will send flowers for the festival’s International Flower Exhibition, which will run December 15-21.

Quick and Easy Christmas Table Display

2007-12-12T15:51:00.000-08:00

I've had one of these designs floating around our house for years. It lives in a box in the Engineers garage and is pulled out annual along with his stuff for eating out doors...
Things to Gather
5 artificial pointsettia (large) 3 thick branches of artificial holly and berry sprays - mine are about 35cm long and about 15cm wide.
Cable ties 10 cm wide Christmas ribbon
Method
Basically what we are going to create are two long lengths comprising of a flower, holly branch, then another flower with a bit of space between each placement, then held together with cable ties. Two are required, then they are pushed back into each other from the stem ends. The stems create a strong support structure. The space in the middle, is then filled with the 5th remaining flower.
Ribbons further secure and embellish display.
The beauty of this design is that it's flat, so it doesn't fall or blow all over the place, plus it's quick and easy...
Lay a pointsettia on work surface, then come down the stem and position one of the holly berry branches, come down further and place another flower. Tie off with a cable tie or two. Make a nice fat thick bow using the ribbon.
Once you have made two, as indicated above bring the stem ends together, leave enough space in the middle section to place remaining flower, which will need to be manipulated into position to sit slightly raised. Cable tie once again to hold firm. Finish off with another nice fat bow in the centre.
Flash Decorated Jandals
I hate jandals at the best of times, but when forced by the Engineer to visit the beach or we go to a pool party, there is always the comment.
I hope you've got sensible SHOES to wear!
So I pull out my beach or pool shoes - hand decorated jandals...
You'll imagine his face...
Things to gather
A pair of jandals or flattish something's Gem-bond glue - or hot glue gun Satay stick with a small amount of bee's wax formed into a small ball (about the size of a cotton bud) this is used to pick up and position jewel on top of glue Gorgeous sparkly rhinestones Or pretty little flowers
Method
Decide on where you want to position jewels or flowers, then mark pattern using a pencil.
Take the glue and apply little droplets on to markings.
Use the waxed end of the satay stick to pick up and place jewels on top of glue.
Allow a good day to ensure glue has dried before wearing.
These would make perfect Christmas gifts.

NAD Asks Traditional Flower Remedies to Stop Ad Claims

2007-12-11T15:55:00.000-08:00

NEW YORK— The National Advertising Division (NAD) of the Council of Better Business Bureaus recommended Traditional Flower Remedies discontinue certain performance claims in advertising for its Calming Essence Cream. According to NAD, certain claims relating to the product’s ability to restore moral and emotional balance and address stress and anxiety are not supported by evidence conducted using the company’s product. Traditional Flower Remedies, a Winona Lake, Ind.-based marketing company, stated the product uses a flower essence formula developed by Dr. Edward Bach, and submitted a clinical study testing Nelson-Bach’s Rescue Remedy.
NAD found no evidence that the Nelson-Bach and Calming Essence Cream products are sufficiently similar so as to allow for the extrapolation and application of the test results. Although NAD stated the body of evidence upon which the advertiser relied might, when considered collectively, provide a reasonable basis for properly qualified claims about the composition of the ingredients in the advertised product and its intended function, it was insufficient to support the specific performance claims made for the product.
In a response statement, Traditional Flower Remedies said while it disagrees with NAD’s findings, “We will not protest vehemently against them. Instead, we will attempt to revise our ads so that we can continue to assist consumers with their needs while remaining within the NAD’s recommendations.”

Sport on TV: Flower power that turned to terror on the Olympic stage

2007-12-08T16:27:00.000-08:00

When the Olympic Games came to Munich in 1972 the world still smelt of the late Sixties – a bouquet of flower power with grace notes of bloody protest. Global terrorism was still in the future, but only by a matter of days, and Olympic Massacre: The True Story (Five, Tuesday), which told the story of the Black September attack on the Israeli athletes, was replete with dramatic irony.
"The opening ceremony was just peace, joy and love," said Joachim Fuchsberger, the Olympic Stadium announcer, while for Ankie Spitzer, wife of the Israeli fencing coach, Andre, the first days of the Games were idyllic: "Every day we went to competitions, we walked about the village, we went to movies, there were jam sessions..." It was the Garden of Eden before the serpent showed up.
The security arrangements were surreal, the idea being to smother protests with love. Manfred Schreiber, the chief of police, described the pre-Games security discussions, such as they were. He had 2,000 unarmed officers with no specialist training, and decided it would be best if they didn't enter the Village at all. In the event of any demos there were plans to shoot candy from Mardi Gras cannons, throw nets over protesters or have policewomen approach them brandishing bunches of flowers. Best of all was the scheme to assemble squads of Dachshund trained to surround protestors and bark at them, disarming them with laughter.
There had been a bit of joined-up thinking; police psychologists had prepared reports on how Palestinian terrorists operated but Manfred Schreiber was having none of it. "Shrinks are just a pain in the arse," he said.
There have been several TV documentaries, as well as the Oscar-winning One Day In September, so the police force's naivete and incompetence that led directly to the slaughter on the runway is familiar material by now. But the details – like no police marksmen in the whole of Germany – and the personal testimonies of the survivors and the bereaved, brought it to life.
They each had their own worst moment. For Ankie Spitzer it was seeing Andre at the window of the apartment talking to the police below with a gun to his head, "blind without his glasses and stripped of his clothes – it's the most painful memory I have."
For Klaus Bechler, one of the helicopter pilots who took the terrorists and hostages to the airfield, there are several candidates for worst moment. There was seeing the Israelis coming off the bus, tied together with red rope – "it was an awful picture, horrible" – but that was exceeded when the shooting started and the terrorists began killing the hostages.
"I heard them screaming in my helicopter," he said. "There was one who wasn't dead yet. He kept on screaming. He screamed for a long time." The three surviving terrorists were shipped out to Tripoli and welcomed as heroes. The bereaved were compensated. In 2004.

New Bill to Feature National Flower

2007-12-07T15:50:00.000-08:00

By Yoon Ja-youngStaff ReporterThe mugunghwa ― also called the rose of Sharon ― and Daedongyeojido, or the Great Map of Korea, will feature on the new 100,000 won banknote along with a portrait of Kim Koo.The Bank of Korea (BOK) said the national flower and the map of Korea, completed by geographer Kim Jeong-ho in 1861, have been tentatively picked as features for the new banknote that will debut in 2009.Kim Koo, the late president of the interim government in Shanghai during the Japanese colonial period from 1910 to 1945, was chosen as the main character of the country's highest denominated bill early last month. ``Considering Kim's symbolic power as a loyalist and patriot, devoted to the independence movement, the Mugunghwa will be featured on the front along with the key figures of the interim government,'' the central bank announced. ``Independence and patriotism'' will be the theme of the front side of the bill. The photo of the interim government figures was taken at the interim government building in Chungking, China, on Nov. 3, 1945, to celebrate their return to Seoul after Japan's defeat. The interim government had to move its post several times due to Japanese oppression. The back of the bill will feature the Daedongyeojido ― currently kept at the museum of Sungshin Women's University in Seoul, and the Bangudae Petroglyphs ― an engraving on a rock in Ulsan. The map and rock engraving are designated as Treasure no. 850 and National Treasure no. 285, respectively. ``The painting, a relic from the pre-historic age, symbolizes the spirit of Koreans. Animals in the rock painting will be featured on the banknote,'' the central bank said.The new 50,000 won-bill will carry a painting of grapes by Shin Saimdang and another painting by Eo Mong-ryong, both painters from the Joseon Kingdom. Shin, a female artist and the mother of famous scholar Yi I, was selected as the main character of the bill last month, despite opposition from progressive female NGOs. They said that Shin, an ideal mother of Confucian society, wasn't a role model for modern women. ``We chose to include the painting to reflect Shin's identity as a female artist,'' the central bank said.The BOK welcomes any opinion on the selection of the new banknote figures at its Website, www.bok.or.kr, until next Wednesday. chizpizza@koreatimes.co.kr

Thief in Germany uses flower pot to steal Porsche

2007-12-04T16:40:00.000-08:00

BERLIN (Reuters) - A thief in Germany used a flower pot to steal a 150,000 euro (107,442 pounds) Porsche.
Reversing out of his open garage, the car's owner heard a scraping noise and got out to investigate, police in the western city of Bonn said on Tuesday.
As the 56-year-old was bending down to remove a flower pot jammed against a tyre, a man pushed him aside, leaped behind the wheel and drove off in his grey Porsche 997 Turbo.
"All the shocked man could do was jump to one side to avoid being run over," police said.

NACIL mulls flower export by Pune-Dubai flight

2007-12-04T00:51:00.000-08:00

Pune, December 3 National Aviation Company of India Limited (NACIL), that was set up following the merger of Air India and Indian on March 30, is planning to tap the unutilised cargo capacity of the direct Pune-Dubai flight for exporting perishable agricultural items. The plan is to set the ball rolling with export flowers to the west Asian market. The first consignment of exports are tentatively scheduled for the first week of January, said deputy general manager of the State Agricultural Marketing Board, Santosh Patil.
A meeting of the aviation company officials, floriculturists, horticulturists and the State Agricultural Marketing Board has been scheduled on December 13 at the Inland Cargo Depot (ICD) at Dighi near here to chalk out a detailed action.
The direct Pune-Dubai flight was started way back in December 2005 by Air India. However, it was after getting taken over by Indian in September 2007, that it was decided to tap this export potential.
“No agriculture items were dispatched from the flight until then. Recently a meeting was held with the state Marketing Minister Harshwardhan Patil to consider the export of perishable agriculture items from Maharashtra. Western Maharashtra is a prolific producer of flowers and the number of growers is increasing by the day. So when there is a direct international flight from Pune, why not make use of it? Currently, farmers from western Maharashtra take their produce to Mumbai for exports,” said Area Marketing Manager of Air India for Pune region, Dhairyashil Vandekar.
At the December 13 meeting, the effort will be to give farmers an opportunity to observe from close quarters various aspects of cargo export and packaging. A preliminary meeting had recently been organised by Air India where farmers from across the state - even from as far as Satara and Kolhapur - had participated.
For floriculturists from the hinterland, who till now had to wait till their produce reached Mumbai before knowing whether it made the grade as exportable commodity to the west Asian countries, this move by NACIL has come as a big shot in the arm.
“Farmers in Satara predominantly grow gerbera, carnation and roses. There is a good market for flowers abroad and the Pune-Dubai flight can be a good chance to export them in a comparatively shorter time. The access to foreign market will mean more money for floriculturists. Other countries have already started pushing their agriculture produce here and this will give us a chance to reverse the trend,” said Rajendra Sarkale, Director of the Ajinkyatara Farmers Co-operative Society of Satara.

If the idea of extending your growing season

2007-05-30T00:29:00.000-07:00

If the idea of extending your growing season has sparked some interest in winter gardening, don't forget that there are a number of crops well suited to winter gardening. Apart from the well-known winter crops such as spinach, leeks, scallions cabbage, kale & parsley, winter gardeners should also try arugula, escarole, claytonia, kohlrabi, mizuna, radicchio, sorrel & watercress, corn salad (mache).

Certain herbs will also grow well in cooler temperatures including cilantro, winter thyme, winter savory & sage. Few flowers will produce under these conditions with the exception of violets & johnny jump-ups.

A few tips:

While each layer of protection will increase temperature, each layer will also cut out about 10% of light. Two layers will not pose a problem but a third layer could cause crop failure due to inadequate light levels.

While soil temperatures are still warm, fertilize leafy greens like spinach, corn salad & sorrel so that they have enough nutrients to take them through the fall.

Harvest greens above their crowns so that growing tip isn't damaged and you get another crop.

First of all, how do you tell a good nursery from a bad one?

2007-05-30T00:25:00.000-07:00

On your first visit, do you get the immediate impression that people are keeping the place clean? A tidy, well-kept nursery means the place is staffed by people who care about what they are doing. Do the plants look upright, well watered, and of good color? Is there a good selection of plants for sale that are suitable for your region?

Don't balk if you see plants that are not well-adapted to your zone. There are gardeners out there who love a challenge, and won't always limit themselves by what they see on the zone map. Even the most ethical nursery will cater to such reckless souls (of which I am one!). Ask questions about basic things and see if the answers make sense for the region in which you garden. (Asking the proper planting time for a plant you've grown successfully is a good test.) If you like the looks of the place and get the feeling the staff is knowledgeable, you've come to the right place.

Now, before you start spending money, decide what you want to plant. This is not to say you can't change the plan if you find something desirable that you hadn't thought of ahead of time, but you can't change a plan until you have one.

If you are planting a flower bed, at least make a rough map showing by location the colors and foliage types you'd like to display. Such a plan need not be too specific; you can fill the bed with whatever happens to be available at the nursery that matches the colors, sizes, and scents you are after.

In addition to this basic plan, make note of the conditions the plants will endure. Knowing such things as how much shade the garden will receive or how well the soil drains will help the nursery staff guide you to plants that have the best chance of thriving where you garden. Such information is vital if you find it necessary to choose a substitute for a plant you put in the plan, but cannot obtain this season.

In the beginning, it was Springtime,

2007-05-30T00:22:00.000-07:00

and you wanted your home to look beautiful. You landscaped with flowers and shrubs, and your yard looked wonderful for about two weeks. But then, they didn't do as well as you hoped. Some of your flowers died, others just look terrible. Why, you must have wondered? You could have sworn you did everything right! What went wrong? It must be your neighbor's advice or that nursery's fault! But alas, a beautiful garden that is easy care and breath-taking involves a little imagination, some planning, researching and some muscle.

So take heart...try envisioning that your plants have souls. They do, you know. I truly believe all living things have souls. Maybe not in a religious context, but in the web of life, a universal form of energy. Have you ever thrown out a flower or shrub that didn't do well and you thought it had died? You tossed it in a garbage can or into a compost heap. Days later, you are working in your compost pile or taking the trash to the curb, when you notice that this very plant that struggled in your garden with the proper water, correct sunlight, and attentive care you gave it, is wrestling to stay alive and is even producing leaves and blooms! That is the spirit of the soul. It amazes me every day that I witness this essence of universal power. Your garden will respond in kind if you are aware of what plants need and provide the proper essentials for a good beginning.

Unlike it's haughty cousin, the hybrid tea rose

2007-05-30T00:19:00.000-07:00

Which takes endless tending, spraying and deadheading, an antique rose is almost carefree. Some, like the rugosas, object to sprays and pampering almost more than they object to pests and diseases. Their easy care, often superior fragrance and amazing variety has caused a huge resurgence in the popularity of the old garden rose.

Some are singles, with a dainty 5-petal array, and some have literally hundreds of petals in a single bloom. Some seem large as cabbages, while others are barely the size of a dime. Some will cover small buildings in a single bound, while others are small enough to grow in quart pots. In the next few weeks I will try to cover the various classes of antique roses, so that anyone who has ever longed to grow roses but been intimidated by their bad press will be sure to find one or more that they can proudly grow in their yards.

why gardening is an art, not a science.....it just depends.

2007-05-29T23:52:00.001-07:00

If you have good loamy soil, use a mulch on the bed to conserve moisture, are growing plants with reasonable water needs (not bog plants or "water hogs") live in a moderate summer climate (not the deep south), and your plants are established (not recently planted), then once a week is probably fine.

It's actually preferable to frequent watering, which can promote shallow roots. If once a week is working for your grass, it will probably be sufficient for your flowers.

If, on the other hand, you have sandy soil, don't use a mulch, and live in a blazing hot climate with the flower bed in full sun, you will need to water more often. You can gain a feel for what's needed in your particular situation by checking the soil moisture a few inches down every so often, and by observing how well your plants grow.

why gardening is an art, not a science.....it just depends.

2007-05-29T23:52:00.000-07:00

I would like to know how often that I should water my flower garden?

2007-05-29T23:50:00.001-07:00

It depends on lots of individual factors, and how they interact.

What kinds of plants are you growing? Some plants droop in mid-day no matter how much water they get, because we try and grow things in climates they're not designed for. Others can take a beating that would kill most people. Marigolds, zinnias and portulaca are some good examples.

What's the soil like, in terms of drainage and water retention? Are you using a mulch? If so, what kind?

What are the microclimates like around your property? In other words, some flowers may be in beds up against the house. At my house, there can be a 3 hour downpour and some of the beds still remain bone dry. Other beds get rain, but much more wind than others, so they dry out faster than the beds in other spots.

Really, the best way to determine watering needs is to observe the plants themselves, and stick your fingers down into the soil up to your knuckles. If it's beginning to feel dry at that depth, it's time to water. If you grab a handful of soil from *BELOW* the surface and squeeze it into a ball, it should stay together, but crumble as easily as cake when you break it up.

I would like to know how often that I should water my flower garden?

2007-05-29T23:50:00.000-07:00

My understanding is that....

2007-05-29T23:49:00.001-07:00

My understanding is that I only need to water my lawn once a week, as long as I add at least one inch of water when I water my lawn. Of course I need to water more often if the weather is hot and dry or if I have added grass seeds. I am wondering whether I can apply the same approach to flower garden watering.

I am asking this not only to learn the frequency of watering, but also to determine if I need to use an automated watering system for the flower garden. If I only need to water once a week, I can easily do this manually without using an automated system. If I need to water as frequent as every other day, I think I am better off using an automated system.

Flower gardening

2007-05-29T23:46:00.000-07:00

Flower gardening is becoming more and more popular every day. Flowers can brighten everyone's day, they smell nice, and are a great hobby.

Flower gardening is simple, inexpensive, and loads of fun. Flower gardening can be done for yard decoration, simply as a hobby, or even professionally. There are some decisions that have to be made before even flower gardening can be started.

You must decide if you want annuals that live for one season and must be replanted every year, or perennials that survive the winter and return again in the summer. When buying and planting, pay attention to what kind of flowers thrive in your climate as well ass the sun requirements.

When flower gardening, you must decide what type of look you want before planting. For instance, mixing different heights, colors, and varieties of flowers together in a "wild-plant style" will give your garden a meadow look and can be very charming. If short flowers are planted in the front of your garden and work up to the tallest flowers in the back you will have a "stepping stone style"....