One of the memories that I have from childhood and adolescence is climbing up into the second floor of our barn—it didn’t have a real loft—and seeing bunches of flowers hanging upside down along wires stretched between the roof beams. At some point in the 1970s my mother began growing flowers that were grown to [...]
Archive for the ‘As Kind’ Category
Fit To Be Dried
Posted in As Kind, As Object, tagged cockscomb, dried flowers, hydrangeas, statice on October 20, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Fine Vines
Posted in As Kind, tagged Clematis, pruning, vines on September 29, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
We have two Clematis vines climbing up opposite sites of our front porch. On the west side is Clematis terniflora, or the autumn clematis, which we put in about four years ago. Deirdre was pruning it in the autumn for the first couple of years and then last year didn’t do anything to it. This [...]
Plant Classification Before Darwin
Posted in As Kind on August 31, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
The urge to classify the natural world is an old one and apparently an essential human characteristic. In a famous instance of the primeval nature of this impulse, during his field work in New Guinea in the 1940s ornithologist Ernst Mayr discovered the tribal people had identified the species of birds of Paradise in detail [...]
Dead Flowers
Posted in As Kind, As Symbol on August 21, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“Take me down little Susie, take me down
I know you think you’re the Queen of the Underground
And you can send me dead flowers every morning
Send me dead flowers by the mail
Send me dead flowers to my wedding
And I won’t forget to put roses on your grave”
This song from the Rolling Stones 1971 album Sticky Fingers [...]
Showing Off the Woodies
Posted in As Kind, tagged flowering shrubs, flowering trees, woody plants on July 29, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Shrubs and trees often have beautiful flowers. Their woody stems give them a certain rigid architectural quality that can serve as a framework for herbaceous, stemmed flowers in an vase.
Shrubs begin flowering before leaf out in the spring. Your spring may begin with spicebush (Lindera benzoin), the so-called “forsythia of the woods,” and end with [...]
Fickle Plant Classification
Posted in As Kind on July 19, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
One of the flowers that will live longest after it is cut is the Peruvian lily, or “lily of the Incas”. The blooms will last two weeks in the vase, but the leaves will not, so you are advised to strip off the leaves before putting them in water.
The popular names of this plant are, [...]
Big Friendly Flowers
Posted in As Kind on June 21, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Sunflowers are impressively large. They are probably one of the few flowers–hollyhocks being another–that can frequently be taller than you are–sometimes much taller. These members of the aster family are fast-growing annuals and perennials; some of them can reach 15 feet.
If you are used to seeing sunflowers growing in rows or bunches at the back [...]
Two Celandines and a Swallow
Posted in As Kind, tagged celandine, invasive species, swallow on May 14, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Greater and lesser celandine are not particularly closely related; their shared common name seems based solely on similar colored flowers. The greater variety is also known as the celandine poppy (Chelidonium majus) and, indeed, is a member of the Papaveraceae, or poppy, family. The lesser variety is sometimes called figwort (Ranunculus ficaria) and is a [...]
Beautiful Filler
Posted in As Business, As Kind, tagged baby's breath, cultivation, dried flowers, florists on April 8, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Baby’s breath (Gypsophila) is one of the most popular “fillers” for cut flower arrangements. After you tell the florist that you would like a dozen roses, or six lilies, or any mixed bouquet, they will generally set off the blossoms that you actually asked for with sprays of small white flowers and greenery. Quite often [...]
