
A Poinsettia is not just for Christmas
02.12.2014Top tips for keeping that much loved Christmas plant alive. We've tested a plant sensor and mixed it up with some good old gardening knowledge...
Top tips for keeping that much loved Christmas plant alive. We've tested a plant sensor and mixed it up with some good old gardening knowledge...
Founded by English gardener John Tebbs, The Garden Edit redraws the traditional boundaries associated with shopping and the garden by bringing together a modern collection of products that embody functionality, timelessness and beauty.
What an amazing gardening-video, published by "Nowness, for the culturally curious"... Enjoy.
The Zurich Succulent Plant Collection is one of the most impressive of its kind, covering more than 4750sqm and displaying over 6500 plants. We visited the collection and brought our good old 35mm camera.
by zoe | 05.05.2014 | fritillaria , meleagris | 0 comments | Rating: 1 votes
Just as a giant panda is easily recognised by the distinctive black patches on its ears, eyes and around its body, the bell-shaped flowers of fritillaria meleagris have a distinctive delicate chequerboard pattern in shades of purple. This spotted marking led to its name, from the Latin word ‘fritillus’ for dicebox, and ‘meleagris’ meaning spotted like a guinea fowl.
Sadly, just like pandas, the sight of the fritillaria meleagris is becoming an infrequent sight in the wild. This is primarily due to the fact that less than 5% of their natural habitat, wildflower meadows, now remains in the UK. A survey in the Peak District suggested that 75% of flower-rich meadows known to exist in the 1980s had been lost or degraded by the mid-1990s. It’s estimated that only 1,000 hectares remain in England, and 100 hectares in Scotland.
Like pandas, who are viewed with a range of opinions from being a graceful and intelligent creature to an evolutionary mistake, the fritillaria meleagris also divides opinion. Whilst the Royal Horticultural Society calls it ‘one of the most exquisite jewels in the treasure house of British wild flowers,’ Vita Sackville-West, a notorious gardener who created the Sissinghurst Castle Garden, called it ‘a sinister little flower, in the mournful colour of decay.’
If you agree with the RHS, you can easily buy spring bulbs for the garden in a variety of cultivars. Consider mixing the purple chequered version with the white-flowered unicolor subvariety.
I think that I shall never see A poem lovely as a tree - Joyce Kilmer (1913)
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