Plant Gardens 101

The botanical name for daffodil, jonquil, and narcissus.

A layer of bark, peat moss, compost, shredded leaves, hay or straw, lawn clippings, gravel, paper, plastic, or other material spread over the soil around the base of plants. During the growing season, a mulch can help retard evaporation, inhibit weeds, and regulate soil temperature. In the winter, a mulch of evergreen boughs, coarse hay, or noncompacting leaves can help protect plants from heaving.

A rose is a rose, is a rose, right? Actually, roses come in numerous discreet varieties and each has its pros and cons. Before you store for roses for your new rose plot, you should know which types of roses there are.

If you dearest the way roses look climbing over an arbor, then you may want to take a close look at climbing roses. While most people call any rose that shoots up cleansing a climbing rose, some of these roses are actually extensive roses. However, they all basically are roses with vigorously rising canes, small plants that tinge liberally during the rose’s thriving season, and very wicked thorns. As climbing roses become well established, some gardeners reinstate their pruning cutters with a ranking saw to slash these plants down to a manageable dimension. These roses are regularly entirely diseases anti.

When you place a climbing rose, you should cut down all but three of the strongest, most good canes. The gives the rose adequate of energy to put into rising stronger, more brisk vines. Tie the three canes gently into place to conductor them in the bearing you’d like them to grow. (more…)

The botanical name for lavender.

Broad beans are relatively easy to grow. Broad beans are grouped in relation to the times they take to mature. There are dwarf broad beans which grow just over 30cm and tall broad beans which grow to over 1.25m in height. They are often one of the first vegetables to produce a crop in summer. Longpod varieties, these contain around 8 oblong beans and are a very hardy crop. The longpods can be sown in late autumn to produce an early crop.

Windsor varieties, these have much shorter pods with fewer beans in, however these produce sweeter beans and greater yields.

Broad beans are best grown in raised beds with a heavy soil which has been well dug in with manure the previous season. Broad beans prefer soil with a high nitrogen level, and not acid soils. Broad beans are easy to sow as they are a large seed which whilst benefiting from a few days in a propogator, can be planted in situ where they will grow. Ideally sow them in double rows alternately spaced, by this I mean seed in one row against a space in the opposite row. Sow to a depth of 6 to 7cm deep and allow 9 to 10 cm between each bean. (more…)

(1707–1778)

1. Perhaps the most famous botanist of all time. While commonly called Linnaeus, he was a Swede whose real name was Karl von Linné. His great contribution was to devise the binomial system for naming plants that is still used today. He gave every plant only two names, the first for its genus and the second for its species. Aster, for instance, is the genus of a group of plants that have many characteristics in common and are closely related. But with more than 250 different asters in this genus, the only way you can tell one from the other is to know what species it is. The specific epithet, or species name, further describes the plant by its characteristics or by who discovered it or where it grows. Linnaeus used the international language of educated people, Latin. Thus Aster alpinus is the name of a rock-garden plant from the mountains. Aster novae-angliae is the New England aster.
2. The great advantage of the Linnaean system is that no two species of plants in the world have the same name. This eliminates the confusion that is often caused by using common names, since the same plant may have more than one common name, and the same common name may be used for different plants. For example, the vine Solanum dulcamara is usually called nightshade but is also called bittersweet. On the other hand, the vines best known as bittersweet are not Solanum at all but Celastrus orbiculatus (Oriental bittersweet) and Celastrus scandens (American bittersweet).