Category Botany

A Scent Garden

One of the most wonderful things about plants is the way some of them smell. Lovely scents come from their flowers or their leaves.

The rose is a sweet-smelling favourite around the world. The sweet pea is a fragrant climbing plant. The tiny, white, bell-shaped lily of the valley has a strong perfume. Many people think that heliotrope smells like vanilla, apple, or cherry pie. One kind of cosmos smells like chocolate.

Fragrant flowering shrubs include the winter jasmine and the gardenia. The leaves of the myrtle plant have a spicy smell when crushed. Daphne and lilacs are also favorites.

A Rock Garden

If your garden has a sunny place that slopes a little, like a small hill, you can make a rock garden. It should look like a tiny bit of mountainside, where small, bright flowers grow among the rocks.

First, bring rocks to the slope. Scoop out shallow holes for them. Put the biggest rocks at the bottom. Put the smaller stones higher up on the slope. Place some of them close together and some further apart. At least half of each rock should be buried in the soil.

Finally, plant small ferns and flowering plants between the rocks. Use plants that won’t grow more than 30 centimetres high.

Picture Credit : Google

A Butterfly Garden

It’s hard to imagine anything prettier than the flashing colours of butterfly wings in a sunny garden. You can grow a garden to attract butterflies by simply choosing the right plants.

Butterflies like to sip nectar, so colourful flowers that make a lot of sweet nectar attract them. Queen Anne’s lace attracts butterflies called black swallowtails. The perfume of sweet William, lavender, and heliotrope also will attract butterflies to your garden. Butterfly weed, sunflowers, and peonies are other butterfly favorites.

Butterflies also will come to a garden to lay their eggs on plants that their caterpillars like to eat. Milkweed is one of these plants. The caterpillar of the monarch butterfly eats milkweed. The caterpillar of the black swallowtail butterfly eats parsley. Several types of caterpillars feed on nettles and clover.

To welcome butterflies, you can put out large flat rocks for them to “sunbathe” on. You might also provide puddles of water where they can drink.

The Garden of Talking Flowers

Alice came upon a large flower bed with a border of daisies and a willow tree growing in the middle.

“O Tiger-lily”, said Alice, addressing herself to one that was waving gracefully about in the wind. “I wish you could talk!”

“We can talk,” said the Tiger-lily, “when there’s anybody worth talking to.”

Alice was so astonished that she could not speak for a minute. It quite seemed to take her breath away. At length, as the Tiger-lily only went on waving about, she spoke again, in a timid voice – almost in a whisper. “And can all the flowers talk?”

“As well as you can,” said the Tiger-lily. “And a great deal louder.”

“It isn’t manners for us to begin, you know,” said the Rose, “and I really was wondering when you’d speak! Said I to myself, ‘Her face has got some sense in it, though it’s not a clever one!”

Then Tiger-lily remarked, “If only her petals curled up a little more, she’d be all right.” Alice didn’t like being criticized, so she began asking questions. “Aren’t you sometimes frightened at being planted out here with nobody to take care of you?”

“There’s the tree in the middle,” said the Rose. “What else is it good for?”

“But what could it do, if any danger came?”

“It says, ‘Bough-wough!’” cried a Daisy. “That’s why its branches are called boughs!”

“Didn’t you know that?” cried another Daisy, and here they all began shouting together, till the air seemed quite full of little shrill voices. “Silence, every one of you!” cried the Tiger-lily, waving itself passionately from side to side and trembling with excitement. “They know I can’t get at them!” it panted, bending its quivering head towards Alice, “or they wouldn’t dare to do it!”

“Never mind!” Alice said in a soothing tone and stooping down at the Daisies, who were just beginning again, she whispered, “If you don’t hold your tongues, I’ll pick you!”

There was silence in a moment, and several of the pink daisies turned white.

“That’s right!” said the Tiger-lily. “The daisies are worst of all. When one speaks, they all begin together, and it’s enough to make one wither to hear the way they go on!”

“How is it you can all talk so nicely?” Alice said, hoping to get it into a better temper by a compliment. “I’ve been in many gardens before, but none of the flowers could talk.”

“Put your hand down and feel the ground,” said the Tiger-lily. ‘Then you’ll know why.”

Alice did so. “It’s very hard,” she said, “but I don’t see what that has to do with it.”

“In most gardens,” the Tiger-lily said, “they make the beds too soft – so that the flowers are always asleep.”

This sounded like a very good reason, and Alice was quite pleased to know it.

Picture Credit : Google

Year-After-Year Flowers

Some flowers don’t have to be planted every year. You plant them just once and leave them in the ground. From then on, they bloom each year. Tulips, for example, have beautiful cup-shaped flowers that bloom each year. Lilies have blade-shaped petals and showy stamens.

Plants that bloom every year are called perennials. Many perennials grow from bulbs or from bulb-like parts called corms. Bulbs are underground buds. They are made up of a small stem covered with thick, fleshy leaves. Onions, tulips, and lilies grow from bulbs. Corms are very similar to bulbs, but their leaves are smaller and thinner. Crocuses and gladioli grow from corms.

Most bulbs and corms should be planted in the autumn. But the package they come in will tell you the best time to plant them.

Many perennials need protection during winter. The package your seeds or bulbs come in, or a gardening book, will tell you what to do for each kind.

Picture Credit : Google

Did you know that every green plant on the earth is a kind of factory? Each one makes food from sunrise to sunset. As it produces food, a green plant gives off an invisible gas called oxygen.

Oxygen is a very important gas. People and animals must have oxygen to live. People and animals take in oxygen when they breathe. You might think that all the oxygen would soon be used up. It would be, if we didn’t have green plants! All day long, they put oxygen into the air.

People and animals give something back to plants, too. People and animals breathe out a gas called carbon dioxide. Plants need lots of carbon dioxide to make food for themselves.

Picture Credit : Google