… can be up to a foot in length are marked with pronounced silver-white veining. Easy-to-grow and perfect for low light. Hardy to Zones 10 – 11. …
Type: Garden Guide Plant
… This hybrid has nice shiny dark-green leaves and grows 10" to 12" tall in sprawling mounds. Lavender-blue petals surround a contrasting red …
Type: Garden Guide Plant
… Miniature flower arrangements offer a charming and whimsical gift for mom, grandma, or anyone special. A nice feature of these tiny bouquets is that you can show off the beauty of small flowers that always sing backup to showier blossoms … kind) A bunch of small flowers—I used mini-carnations, waxflowers (Chamelaucium uncinatum), and baby’s breath (Gypsophila paniculata) Fresh herbs (thyme, rosemary, and lavender work well …
Type: Blog
… Butterflies have unique features they use for socializing, mating, warding off predators, and more! Scarlet Mormon (Papilio rumanzovia) Photo by Bill Bishoff Consider the butterfly’s ability to see ultraviolet light. UV light is a spectrum of light between 10 and 400 nanometers that humans and most other animals cannot sense. Butterflies have complex …
Type: Blog
… familiar with some of the challenges that sometimes face older folks: muscles may get weaker and ache more readily. Falls can do more damage. Your energy and endurance may wane, and your skin may get thinner. Your eyesight and memory many not be as … four “P’s,” if you will—enable many older gardeners to carry on. Keeping active in the garden is what our volunteers love best. There is no better place to start than prevention. Since …
Type: Blog
… Landmarks of America, you see model trains chugging charmingly through the trees, mountains, and cityscapes, and clacking across bridges as they merrily toot their horns. You don’t see the workshop crammed … trains rolling at the Chicago Botanic Garden. A room in the basement of the Regenstein Center is the hive of repair activity for the Model Railroad Garden. There are also ghost trains for …
Type: Blog
… has made me appreciate these moments even more. Budburst encourages everyone to observe and record how plants change with the seasons. The spots of green usually come from evergreen … to be conifers , which have modified leaves called needles. I marvel at how conifer branches and needles, laden with snow, hold all that weight. In contrast, I appreciate the exposed branch structure of a deciduous tree, naked of its leaves. The ingenuity of leaf loss is protection, preventing branches from bearing too much weight and breaking when it snows. All I …
Type: Blog
… be thinking. “What about basil?” Discover a world of uses for your herb harvest—essential and flavored oils, vinegars, jams and jellies—at Herb Garden Weekend. Sure, tarragon ( Artemisia dracunculus ) has silvery leaves and an anise-like flavor, but basil is the king of herbs, beloved by all. It’s such a crowd-pleaser that we’re giving away Napoletano …
Type: Blog
… The Martian: Many of us watched and loved the movie. Some of us read the book. A few of us got inspired to use the story to teach … science to students. The Martian by Andy Weir tells the fictional story of NASA astronaut and botanist Mark Watney, who becomes stranded alone on Mars and has to figure out how stay alive … on to other projects. One important thing I must mention: technically speaking, this mixture is not truly soil. Soil is the upper layer of material on the Earth that serves as an ideal …
Type: Blog
… to the rare phenomenon of a corpse flower in full bloom. We chatted with the early birds and met some “regulars”—visitors who had come by to meet Spike, the Garden’s first titan arum on display last August, and Alice, the corpse flower that bloomed last September. Maxwell and Lexi (in her Alice T-shirt) … found out on the Internet. The Internet knows everything. Lexi: It’s very stinky. Maxwell: It is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see it. And it is very stinky. Carrie: I happened to see the …
Type: Blog
