Selecting Plants

-
Selecting Plants
Plants differ in their tolerance for heat, cold, and moisture, so when selecting plants, gardeners must take into account the climate of their region. Gardeners also evaluate the soil type and how much sunlight falls on the proposed site, factors that affect the types of plants that can be grown in a particular area. They consider, too, the plant’s life cycle—how long it takes a plant to grow, flower, produce fruits or seeds, and die. Annuals such as petunias bloom and produce seed the same year they are planted, then die when cold temperatures set in. Biennials—hollyhocks, for example—live for two years, producing just leaves the first year. In the second year they produce flowers, and die when the weather turns cold. Perennials, which include shrubs and trees as well as flowers, are plants that live for three or more years.

A gardener can experiment with a stunning diversity of interesting garden styles and types. Herb gardens may feature culinary herbs, medicinal herbs, and fragrant herbs. Flower gardens may combine a variety of flowering plants or focus on just one type, such as roses, white-flowered plants, or flowers that bloom only at night. Specialized gardens include rock or alpine gardens, which display plants native to mountains, and water gardens, which host plants adapted to wet conditions. Botanical gardens are designed to display plants for scientific and educational purposes, and in these gardens, the plants are often labeled with their names and their optimal growing conditions.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Monocot and Dicot Seeds

-
Image
Monocotyledons (monocots) and dicotyledons (dicots) make up the two large groups of flowering plants, differentiated by their seed structures. Monocot seeds contain one cotyledon, or embryonic leaf. When these seeds germinate, the cotyledon remains below ground, absorbing nutrients from the endosperm, the starchy food supply in the seed. The coytledon transports these nutrients to the developing seedling. Dicot seeds contain two coytledons, which absorb and store the nutrients from the endosperm before the seed germinates. The cotyledons, thick with stored nutrients, emerge above ground during germination, and then transport the stored nutrients to the developing seedling. For a brief time, the cotyledons also serve as the first photosynthesizing leaves, but they wither and die when the true leaves emerge. related articles: flower flower variations in structure flower sexual reproduction flower pollination and fertilization flowering and the life cycle evolution of flowers angios
Read more

Gymnosperm

-
Image
Gymnosperm (Latin gymn-, “naked”; Greek sperma, “seed”), is a common name for any seed-bearing vascular plant without flowers. There are several types: the cycad , ginkgo , conifer , yew , and gnetophyte. Gymnosperms are woody plants, either shrubs, trees, or, rarely, vines (some gnetophytes). They differ from the other phylum of seed plants, the flowering plants (see Angiosperm ), in that the seeds are not enclosed in carpels but rather are borne upon seed scales arranged in cones. The gymnosperms are the most ancient seed plants; they appear to have arisen from fern ancestors in the Devonian Period. Cycads retain the most primitive characters of the extant seed plants. Gnetophytes are considered from morphological and molecular evidence to share a common ancestry with the flowering plants. Living gymnosperms are distributed worldwide, with a majority, particularly the conifers, in temperate and subarctic regions. Cycads and gnetophytes are mainly tropical to subtropical. There are ab
Read more

Cedar Tree

-
Image
Cedar (tree) is a common name for three or four species of large trees native to mountainous areas of North Africa and Asia. Cedar trees belong to the pine family, the members of which have needlelike leaves and, like all conifers, bear their seeds on scales clustered into cones. They differ from other members of the family in their evergreen four-angled leaves borne on short side-branches. The genus produces fragrant, durable, red-colored wood used in construction and cabinetry. The name cedar is also applied to other conifer trees with fragrant wood (see Cypress ). The well-known white cedar grows in swamps of the eastern United States and reaches a height of 24 m (80 ft). An arborvitae is also called cedar; western cedar and eastern white cedar are both important timber trees in the United States. Eastern red cedar, widespread in the eastern United States, is a juniper . A flowering tropical American mahogany is known as Spanish or West Indian cedar. Incense Cedar Native to wester
Read more