Category Botany

Names of Flowers

Did you ever wonder how some wild flowers got their names?

The daisy looks a little bit like an eye. And, like an eye, it opens up at the start of each day. So, long ago in England, people named it “day’s eye”. In time, the name became daisy.

The buttercup got its name because it looks like a tiny cup made of yellow butter. Long ago, people believed that butter was yellow because cows ate buttercups. But that’s not true. Butter does get its colour from what cows eat, but cows don’t eat buttercups.

Milkweed gets its name from the white juice that oozes from the stems when the plant is cut. The juice looks like milk. When the juice dries in the sun, it covers the cut like a rubbery bandage.

For years, people in different parts of the world have eaten the young, spring leaves of dandelions. They thought the jagged edges of the leaf looked like a row of teeth. So, long ago, the people of France gave the plant the name dent de lion, which means “lion’s tooth”. To the people of England, dent de lion sounded like dandelion, and that’s what they called the plant!

One plant that many cats love is called catmint! A cat that finds a clump of catmint may roll happily around among the leaves. Many cat owners give their pets balls or toys stuffed with dried catmint leaves.

Some people like catmint too, but not usually to roll around in. They drink it. They make catmint tea by putting dried catmint leaves into boiling water and adding a little honey.

World of Gardens

In every part of the world, people have a favourite kind of garden. In a formal garden, flowers are arranged in squares, circles, or fancy shapes. Bushes are often trimmed to points, squares, or balls. Garden paths are long and straight. In Japan, many gardens have little bridges in them. In India, gardens often have ponds filled with water lilies. Gardens in Hawaii may have many ferns. Gardeners in other parts of the world often copy these favourite gardens.

Picture Credit : Google

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

The forests of the world give us wood. Wood is used to make many things. The strong, beautiful wood of such trees as beech, oak, mahogany, teak, and walnut is used in building and to make fine furniture, musical instruments, and woodcarvings. Wood from pine, spruce, and cedar is used to make everything from houses and furniture to pencils.

Much of the wood harvested in the world is used in paper. Without paper, we’d have no print books, no cardboard, and no newspapers. Most paper is made from wood pulp. It takes the timber of thousands of trees to make the paper for just one edition of a large daily newspaper.

Wise foresters are careful to plant trees to replace those they cut down, but it’s important that people reuse and recycle as much paper as they can. Saving our waste paper could save a tree from the axe!

Baseball Bats and Hockey Sticks

Houses, tables, chairs, and floors, Rowboats, pencils, desks, and doors, Baseball bats and hockey sticks, Boxes for magicians’ tricks. Each and every one of these is made of wood that comes from trees.

Pants give us many of the products used to make clothing. Your favourite old sweatshirt may be made from soft cotton. The strong, waterproof soles of your shoes are probably made of rubber.

Cotton comes from the seed pods of a plant. When the pods are ripe, they look like fluffy balls. The fluff can be twisted into thread and then woven into cloth.

Flax and hemp plants have stringy fibres in their stalks. The stalks are dried and scraped, then combed into long strips that can be spun into thread. Flax fibres are woven into a fine cloth called linen. Hemp makes coarser material that is used to make carpets and rope.

Rubber trees are often grown in large forests called plantations. To get the rubber out of a tree, workers make slanting cuts in the bark. Juice called latex oozes out of the cuts and drips into a container underneath. The latex is taken to a factory and made into rubber.