Anthurium

Plant Profile: Narcissus

2008-09-25T17:39:00.000-07:00

source : www.abc.net.au

Narcissus , Hybrid Cultivar, Tazetta Hybrid, 'Aspasia'" class="featureImg" width="400">

Narcissus , Hybrid Cultivar, Tazetta Hybrid, 'Aspasia'

Traits: Sun, Shade, Coastal, Groundcover, Rockery, Container, Fragrant

Commonly known as daffodil and jonquil, Narcissus is part of the amaryllis (Amaryllidaceae) family and includes around 50 species of mainly spring-flowering bulbs found in Europe, North Africa, and western Asiatheir appeal is such that thousands of garden forms are now available. Daffodilsboth the species and the hybrids and cultivarsare divided into 12 divisions based on their flower shape and form. All parts of the plant are poisonous and can cause a form of hyperactive seizure that leads to depression and possibly coma. The genus name comes from the Greek mythological tale of the youth Narcissus who fell in love with his reflection in a pool. Unable to pull himself away, he eventually wasted away to become a flower.

Flowering Season: Summer, Spring

Appearance

Narcissus plants are generally very hardy and quite adaptable, growing in borders, pots, or in drifts across lawns. Many have the typical strap-like blue-green leaves but some have fine grassy foliage. The flowers have a cup- or trumpet-shaped corona backed by 6 petals that are sometimes very much reduced in size. The color range of the genus includes, white, all shades of yellow, orange, and pink.

Cultivation

Daffodils have varying soil preferences. The traditional large-cupped forms do best in a fairly heavy loam, while the southern Mediterranean and North African species like a drier grittier soilbut they all need good drainage. They prefer a position in full sun or half sun when in growth, and do well under deciduous trees. Although they are almost maintenance-free, they will appreciate supplemental water during dry periods. Leave the foliage to die off naturally before lifting. While seed can be sown, propagation is normally from natural offsets.

Garden Design Basics to Save You Future Headaches

2008-09-23T04:30:00.000-07:00

The only way to get good at garden design is to do it. Luckily, you can’t fail. Plants can always be moved or replaced. Even if your tastes change completely, your garden can follow suit.

What are the Elements of Garden Design?

Gardening is often called the only living art form. Like any form of art, designing a garden is subjective. Although gardening successfully requires learning certain skills, in the end, a garden’s beauty is in the eye of the beholder. There are no fixed rules to garden design. But there are a few elements of composition that will serve the garden designer well, when combining plants.

Why You Need Bones in Your Garden.

You’ll also hear a lot of talk about starting your garden with good bones. That basically means creating a outlining foundation, with trees, structures, paths and such, for the rest of the garden to build off of. A favorite and easily incorporated technique for creating garden bones is to use evergreens, especially dwarf conifers.

How to Create a Focal Point

Every garden, no matter what its size, benefits from a focal point. Without a main feature, the viewer’s eye is more likely to flit from plant to plant, section to section, without zeroing in to examine and appreciate the harmony of the composition.

Learning to Appreciate and Use Plants for Texture and Form

Perhaps the most overlooked tool in garden design is the use of texture. Plants are so varied in texture, you could have an entirely green garden and still have plenty of interest, if you varied textures. As you start to become more discerning about the texture of foliage, you’ll also begin to notice the interplay of plant forms. New gardeners are frequently attracted to the same type of plant over and over again. Perhaps it’s feathery foliage or spiky leaves. Too much of a good thing can make your garden looked chaotic and blurred. One architectural, bold-leaved plant, like a canna, can restore order.

Making Color in the Garden Work

Finally there’s color. Actually, many gardeners like to start with color because it’s a familiar design element. But nature pulls a fast one on us. Even though we know yellow and blue look good together, orange and red will clash and white goes with anything, there are so many shades of each of these colors; even white. Experimenting is the best way to get to know what colors work for you. But the best advice for brand new garden designers is to keep your pallette limited. Start with 2-3 colors and you won’t have to worry about making your viewers dizzy.

Tweaking the Existing Garden That Got Out of Control

Since gardening is a living art form, it is constantly changing. Gardens get better over time, with plants filling in, mingling and becoming more lush. But there will probably come a time when more is just too much and you’ll want to think about a redesign, or what I like to call, reining in your garden. That starts with taking a good hard look at what exactly is bothering you about your garden, as it is and making small changes until it’s back to where you want it.

Grow Your Own Vegetables

2008-09-20T02:18:00.000-07:00

When planning a vegetable garden, it's OK to dream big. Just remember that gardens that make efficient use of space are much easier to care for.

Growing your own vegetables is both fun and rewarding. All you really need to get started is some decent soil and a few plants. But to be a really successful vegetable gardener, and to do it organically, you'll need to understand what it takes to keep your plants healthy and vigorous. Here are the basics.

"Feed the soil" is like a mantra for organic gardeners, and with good reason. In conventional chemical agriculture, crop plants are indeed "fed" directly using synthetic fertilizers.

When taken to extremes, this kind of chemical force-feeding can gradually impoverish the soil. And turn it from a rich entity teeming with microorganisms insects and other life forms, into an inert growing medium that exists mainly to anchor the plants' roots, and that provides little or no nutrition in its own right.

Although various mineral nutrients (agricultural lime, rock phosphate, greensand, etc.) should be added periodically to the organic garden, by far the most useful substance for building and maintaining a healthy, well-balanced soil is organic matter.You can add organic matter to your soil many different ways, such as compost, shredded leaves, animal manures or cover crops.

Organic matter improves the fertility, the structure and the tilth of all kinds of soils. In particular, organic matter provides a continuous source of nitrogen and other nutrients that plants need to grow. It also provides a rich food source for soil microbes. As organisms in the soil carry out the processes of decay and decomposition, they make these nutrients available to plants. For more on this subject, read Building Healthy Soil.

Make Efficient Use of Space

The location of your garden (the amount of sunlight it receives, proximity to a source of water, and protection from frost and wind) is important. Yet just as crucial for growing vegetables is making the most of your garden space.

Lots of people dream of having a huge vegetable garden, a sprawling site that will be big enough to grow everything they want, including space-hungry crops like corn, dried beans, pumpkins and winter squash, melons, cucumbers and watermelons. If you have the room and, even more importantly, the time and energy needed to grow a huge garden well, then by all means go for it. But gardens that make efficient use of growing space are much easier to care for, whether you're talking about a few containers on the patio or a 50-by-100-foot plot in the backyard.

Get Rid of Your Rows

The first way to maximize space in the garden is to convert from traditional row planting to 3 or 4-foot-wide raised beds. Single rows of crops, while they might be efficient on farms that use large machines for planting, cultivating, and harvesting, are often not the best way to go in the backyard vegetable garden. In a home-sized garden, the fewer rows you have, the fewer paths between rows you will need, and the more square footage you will have available for growing crops.

If you are already producing the amount of food you want in your existing row garden, then by switching to raised beds or open beds you will actually be able to downsize the garden. By freeing up this existing garden space, you can plant green manure crops on the part of the garden that is not currently raising vegetables and/or rotate growing areas more easily from year to year. Or you might find that you now have room for planting new crops—rhubarb, asparagus, small fruits, or flowers for cutting—in the newly available space.

Other good reasons to convert from rows to an intensive garden system like raised beds or open beds include:

Less effort. When vegetables are planted intensively they shade and cool the ground below and require less watering, less weeding, less mulching—in other words, less drudge work for the gardener.

Less soil compaction. The more access paths you have between rows or beds, the more you and others will be compacting the soil by walking in them. By increasing the width of the growing beds and reducing the number of paths, you will have more growing area that you won't be walking on, and this untrammeled soil will be fluffier and better for plants' roots.

Grow Up, Not Out

Next to intensive planting, trellising represents the most efficient way to use space in the garden. People who have tiny gardens will want to grow as many crops as possible on vertical supports, and gardeners who have a lot of space will still need to lend physical support to some of their vegetables, such as climbing varieties of peas and pole beans. Other vegetables that are commonly trellised include vining crops such as cucumbers and tomatoes.

The fence surrounding your garden may well do double-duty as a trellis, so long as the crops grown on the fence can be rotated in different years. Other kinds of trellises are generally constructed from either wood or metal. However, no matter which design or materials you use, be sure to have your trellis up and in place well before the plants require its support—preferably even before you plant the crop. With some vegetables, such as tomatoes or melons, you may also have to tie the plants gently to the support, or carefully weave them through the trellis as they grow.

Keep Crops Moving

Crop rotation within the vegetable garden means planting the same crop in the same place only once every three years. This policy ensures that the same plants will not deplete the same nutrients year after year. It can also help foil any insect pests or disease pathogens that might be lurking in the soil after the crop is harvested.

To use a three-year crop rotation system, make a plan of the garden on paper during each growing season, showing the location of all crops. If, like most people, you grow a lot of different vegetables, these garden plans are invaluable, because it can be difficult to remember exactly what you were growing where even last season, much less two years ago. Saving garden plans for the past two or three years means that you don't have to rely on memory alone.

A Continuous Harvest

Planting crops in succession is yet another way to maximize growing area in the garden. All too often, though, gardeners will prepare their seedbeds and plant or transplant all their crops on only one or two days in the spring, usually after the last frost date for their location.

While there is nothing wrong with planting a garden this way, wouldn't it be easier to plant a few seeds or transplants at a time, throughout the course of the whole growing season, rather than facing the herculean task of "getting in the garden" all at one time?

After all, a job almost always becomes easier the more you divide it up. Plan to plant something new in the garden almost every week of the season, from the first cold-hardy greens and peas in late winter or early spring, to heat-loving transplants such as tomatoes, peppers and eggplant once the weather becomes warm and settled.

Then start all over again, sowing frost-hardy crops from midsummer through mid-fall, depending on your climate. Keep cleaning out beds as you harvest crops to make room for new vegetables that will take their place. You can even interplant crops that grow quickly (radishes) alongside other vegetables that require a long season (carrots or parsnips), sowing their seeds together. This makes thinning out the bed easier later on, since you will have already harvested the quick-growing crop and given the long-season vegetables that remain some much-needed elbow room.

Another benefit of succession planting, of course, is that your harvest season lasts longer for every crop. This means that, instead of getting buried in snap beans or summer squash as your plants mature all at once, you can stagger plantings to ensure a steady, but more manageable supply of fresh vegetables.

Keep Good Records

Finally, we end up where we started—with the realization that, although vegetable gardening can be rewarding even for beginners, there is an art to doing it well. There is also a mountain of good information and advice from other gardeners available to you. Yet one of the most important ways of improving your garden from year to year is to pay close attention to how plants grow, and note your successes and failures in a garden notebook or journal.

Just as drawing a garden plan each year helps you remember where things were growing, taking notes can help you avoid making the same mistakes again, or ensure that your good results can be reproduced in future years. For instance, write down all the names of different vegetable varieties, and compare them from year to year, so you will know which ones have done well in your garden.

Many people keep a book in their car to record when they change their oil and perform other routine maintenance. In the same way, get in the habit of jotting it down whenever you apply organic matter or fertilizer to the garden, or the dates on which you plant or begin to harvest a crop.

Over time this kind of careful observation and record-keeping will probably teach you more about growing vegetables than any single book or authority. That’s because the notes you make will be based on your own personal experience and observations, and will reflect what works best for you in the unique conditions of your own garden. As in so many other pursuits, so it is in the art of vegetable gardening: practice does make perfect.

Anthrium

2008-09-20T02:00:00.000-07:00

source : wikipedia.org
Anthurium (Schott, 1829), is a large genus of about 600- 800 (possibly 1,000) species, belonging to the arum family (Araceae). TROPICOS lists 1901 types, although some of these are duplicates. It is one of the largest and probably the most complex genus of this family; certainly it is one of the most variable. Many species are undoubtedly not yet described and new ones are being found every year. The species has neotropical distribution; mostly in wet tropical mountain forest of Central America and South America, but some in semi-arid environments. Most species occur in Panama, Colombia, Brazil, the Guiana Shield and Ecuador. According to the work of noted aroid botanist Dr. Tom Croat of the Missouri Botanical Garden, this genus is not found in Asia.^[1] Some species have been introduced into Asian rain forests, but are not endemic.

Flowering and Fruiting

Anthurium flowers are small (about 3 mm) and develop crowded in a spike on a fleshy axis, called a spadix, a characteristic of the Araceae. The flowers on the spadix are often divided sexually with a sterile band separating male from female flowers. This spadix can take on many forms (club-shaped, tapered, spiraled, and globe-shaped) and colors (white, green, purple, red, pink, or a combination).

The spadix is part of an inflorescence, the outer portion of which is known as the spathe. The spathe may be a single color (yellow, green, or white) or possibly multicolored including burgundy and red. That sometimes colorful, solitary spathe is a showy modified bract that can be somewhat leathery in texture. Anthurium grown for the florist trade generally have highly coloured spathes and spadices. There are no flowers on the spathe as is sometimes thought; flowers are found solely on the spadix. The spathe can vary in color from pale green to white, rose, orange or shiny red (such as A. andrenaum). The color changes between the bud stage and the anthesis, (the time the flower expands). Thus the color might change from pale green to reddish purple to reddish brown.

The flowers are hermaphrodite, containing male and female flowers. The fruits are usually berries with one to multiple seeds on an infructescence that may be pendant or erect depending on species. Anthurium berries may range in colour from bright red to black, and may also be bicoloured or shaded. The flowers of Anthurium give off a variety of fragrances, each attracting a variety of specific pollinators.

Several species are popular in the florist trade as pot plants or cut flowers and for interior decoration. They include forms such as A. crystallinum f peltifolium with its large, velvety, darkgreen leaves and silvery white venation. Most hybrids are based on A. andreanum or A. scherzerianum because of their colorful spathes. Anthurium can also be called "Flamingo Flower" or "Boy Flower", both referring to the structure of the spathe and spadix.

Growing Anthurium

Like other Aroids, many species of Anthurium can be grown as houseplants, or outdoors in mild climates in shady spots. They thrive in moist soils with high organic matter. In milder climates the plants can be grown in pots of soil. Indoors plants thrive at temperatures between 60-72 degrees and at lower light than other house plants. Wiping the leave off with water will remove any dust and insects. Plant in pots with good roots systems will benefit from a weak fertilizer solution ever other week. In the case of vining or climbing Anthuriums, the plants benefit from being provided with a totem to climb.

Propagation

As with most Aroids, new plants can be grown by taking stems cuttings with at least two joints. Cuttings can be then rooted in pots of sand and peat moss mixtures. These pots then should be placed in greenhouses with bottom heat of 70-75 degrees. During the rooting process they should be kept out of direct sunlight. Once rooted the plants can be transplanted to larger pots or directly outside in milder climates. A second way to propigate Anthurium is to take stem cuttings particularly from trailing varieties and place them in water. In four to five weeks the plant should develop roots and can be transferred to pots. The final method is through direct planting of mature seed or berries.

Images

An anthurium in bloom at Marie Selby Botamical Gardens, Sarasota, Florida	Anthurium digitatum - detail	Anthurium digitatum - habit	Flamingo Lily (Anthurium andreanum)
Pink anthurium, grown indoors