Mykonos, Greece

Mykonos, Greece

Versaille garden's

Beatiful garden in France

Amazing gardens

Amazin gardens

Bring a Little Green Indoors

Green House Plants are more than just decor. Recent research studies have proven that you live happier and healthier with houseplants in your home.
Why is our desire to bring nature indoors so compelling? Some of the most popular reasons:

• Clean Air: houseplants act as filters, removing pollutants and harmful particles from the air in your home or office. Certain plants can reduce pollutants up to 87% in just 24 hours.
• Nurturing: We have a basic instinct to care for other living things. Plants used indoors convey the message that we care. It is fulfilling to see our natural world healthy and growing in our indoor spaces

  

Healthy: The life cycle of plants causes them to absorb CO2 and many other pollutants from the air and release life giving oxygen. Spirits are lifted by the visual appeal and by the fragrance provided by some that flower. Humidity is increased making breathing easier.

 

• Beauty: Our natural surroundings have a beauty that is calming, creating a secure feeling. The graceful appearance of plants adds beauty and charm. Flowering plants provide added touches of color.
• Alive: Living, growing, green plants convey the message that this area is alive and cared for.

Orchids are everywhere. Pick up any home decorator magazine or watch TV, and you’re bound to see an orchid gracing any well-dressed room. Exotic and elegant, colorful and unique, a single flower makes a bold statement.

Contrary to popular belief, Orchid plants are relatively easy to grow.

Proper watering is the key to success. Too much water is as detrimental as not enough. Overwatering is the number cause of death of orchids in the home.

Unlike many houseplants that like an even, consistent moisture, most Orchids thrive with a bit of neglect. Most need to dry out between waterings, which is about once a week. This varies depending on the season and stage of growth. Generally, water the plant when the pot feels light.

Dishin’ Some Dirt on Great Gardens

When I travel, there are always three things I look for as entertainment – museums, old churches and gardens. Today, I’m focusing on gardens. I love me some gardens. There’s a true art and beauty to a well maintained garden. I love and appreciate the people who toil in them every day seeking perfection and accepting that they probably won’t get it. When I visit a garden, I like to take my time and enjoy it slowly. Sometimes I’ll meander and take pictures for hours. It makes me a happy girl. I’ve been fortunate enough to see some really great ones. Here are a few I love. I hope you get the chance to see them, too.

The Japanese Gardens in Seattle:

Wildflower meadows in London’s 2012 Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park

The BBC Today Programme (7.45 on 20.8.2012) had an item about the wildflower meadows being one of the great successes of the 2012 Olympic Games. I congratulate Nigel Dunnett and James Hitchmough on their planting design – and would like to know more about the origins of the planting design idea. Their history may be as follows, but any extra details from readers would be welcome:

• EDAW (now AECOM) produced the master plan for what was the Olympic Park during the games and will re-open as the Queen Elizabeth Park in 2013. The idea for the planting design may have been theirs.
• LDA with George Hargreaves produced the design plans – and probably commissioned Dunnett and Hitchmough.
• LDA were guided by the Olympic Development Authority ODA and by John Hopkins, landscape architect and Head of Parklands & Public Realm at the Olympic Development Agency
• Dunnett and Hitchmough were probably inspired by Piet Oudolf’s ideas on New Perennial planting design
• Oudolf probably drew on Christopher Lloyd’s advocacy of wildflower meadows, and his work at Great Dixter
• Christopher Lloyd was inspired by his mother, the beautifully named Daisy Lloyd, who made a flowery meadow at Dixter which she connected with the meadows in renaissance painting (eg Botticelli’s Primavera) and Pre-Raphaelite painting. Daisy also introduced Christopher to Gertrude Jekyll – and both were surely influenced by William Robinson.
• Gertrude Jekyll popularised the idea of using plants in ‘drifts’
• William Robinson shared John Ruskin’s love of the middle ages. He wrote a famous book on The Wild Garden and advocated ‘wild flower meadows’ instead of mown grass.
• A medieval ‘meadow’ was ‘a piece of land permanently covered with grass to be mown for use as hay’ OED (mædewan, mædua, mæduen, etc in Old English).
• Meadows contained wild flowers and meadow turf was cut from pastures and laid in gardens, probably as ground cover in small herbers for the delight of ladies and minstrels. ‘Mead’ is cognate with meadow. Deriving from Old Dutch and Old German, it was used rarely in Old English but later became popular with poets etc in the combination ‘flowery mead’.

The flowers in old English meadows were, of course ‘wild’ flowers. Those used in the Olympic 2012 Queen Elizabeth Park were wild somewhere at some time. But many are cultivars from outside the UK. If my plant identification is satisfactory, the above photograph has: Coreopsis (Tickseed, native to North America), Centaurea cyanus (Cornflower, native in the UK), Chrysanthemum carinatum ‘Polar Star’ (a cultivar of the annual chrysanthemum, native to North America), Calendula spp (pot marigold, native to the Middle East). The drifts of annual and perennial plants in the Lea Valley have visual connections with meadows and  the flowers are, or were, wild in some place at some time.  But they will not be used as pastures and one could make a good case for NOT calling them ‘wildflower meadows’. As Immanual Kant observed, paradox is an inescapable aspect of how we understand the world.