The Green Thumb Visiting a Flower Garden

Hello everyone! Wow, another week is finally here! February is  quite a not a boring month. There are a lot of things to do especially at home. My days are always busy inspite staying at home all the time.  I wish spring season is around the corner because I am already quite excited to see the tulips in our garden. It is not a long wait anymore because in a month or two,  I will surely be seeing my flowers  in our garden.

Varieties of orchids in the garden center.

This is only one good thing because when I really get  bored, which is  seldom to happen, I always look at the flowers in  my photo albums. If not, I also drive to the nearest garden center. Sometimes, I bring home flowers with me but most of the time, I don't really buy one. Our home is already full of  plants and decors. Every window has  plants and decors on it.  Except when it is spring  or summer,  I cannot say no to buying flowers.

Lovely bromeliads at the garden center. One of the flowers that I love.

One things I love doing when going to a garden center is to take photographs of the different flowers inside. I am glad that even the saleslady or salesman who caught me taking pictures would just say nothing. I am always happy coming home when I am done visiting a garden center.

Lovely Gerbera Flowers

This flower was named after the German botanist Traugott Gerber. When I was still young our neighbor had these flowers and we call it daisy. Gerbera is also commonly known as African Daisy, Transvaal Daisy, and Barberton Daisy.

Gerbera is very popular and widely used as a decorative garden plant or as cut flowers. The domesticated cultivars are mostly a result of a cross between Gerbera jamesonii and another South African species Gerbera viridifolia. The cross is known as Gerbera hybrida. Thousands of cultivars exist. They vary greatly in shape and size. Colours include white, yellow, orange, red, and pink. The centre of the flower is sometimes black. Often the same flower can have petals of several different colours.

Green Job: Five Places To Do Gardening For a Living

If you have a green thumb, gardening can be a good profession anywhere in the world. Gardeners work at places where lawns, gardens, and trees need professional care. Depending on the country and season, gardeners and groundskeepers are responsible for garden furniture care, preserving the condition of the soil, and planting, watering, and pruning flowers, shrubs and trees. Often, gardeners are called upon for their creative flair, whether it’s adding garden accessories, decorative garden lighting fixtures, or simply designing a new layout which increases its visual appeal.

tulips from our garden last spring 2011

Many community residents are frustrated in trying to keep their lawns in good condition due to health issues or difficulties relating to age. After obtaining a relevant work visa (if applicable) start with offering your services to senior citizens in and people who are getting ready to go on vacation. Also, check with local lawn services. Once you have built a good reputation and a small clientele, offer your services to businesses and institutions that have gardens around their buildings, such as:

1) Housing Developments

Depending on the economic growth of the country you live in, housing developments that exist often employ gardeners to and maintenance of grass, trees, shrubs, plants, and flowers.


2) Resorts and Hotels

In any country you go to, there are always resorts and hotels. These establishments usually have massive grounds which employ gardeners and landscapers to maintain the appearance, health, and condition of grass, flowers and trees.

3) Apartment Complexes

Villas and apartments hire gardeners and groundskeepers to provide care for grass, trees, shrubs, plants, and flowers.

4) Schools and Colleges

Again, there Schools and colleges use gardeners to cut, fertilize and water their lawns.

5) Churches, Temples, Mosques, Monuments and Cemeteries

These places hire gardeners to take care of lawns and gardens. Often they can involve landscaping and manicuring gardens and flower displays and arrangements.

If you enjoy the outdoors, you can easily turn a gardening hobby into a profession. It is easy to start a gardening business, whether you want to work full-time or just a few hours a week.

Need A Yard Makeover

Did you just see the second image I posted here? This is a part of our yard and garden. Have you seen the dilapidated walls near the stairs going to the pavilion? I believed it is very clear now why we need to do some yard makeover. Our yard will have a new face before summer comes. I guarantee that. This is also the reason why until now, I am still searching for good ideas on how to transform this space into an enchanting part of our garden.

I have been looking for garden ideas in magazines and in the internet for the past weeks. Good to know that I already found some. Hubby and I only need to decide what is the best one. We are also planning to buy new set of garden furniture and maybe some outdoor toys like sand pits and slide for children to play. The latter is quite a good idea since we don't have a room inside the house for children to play. For sure, my friends' children will be surprised about this.

Here are some images from our chaotic garden.

Some of the flowers I grow in our garden. I hope to arrange them better this year especially with our yard makeover project.

This is a part of our yard that needs some make-over. See how scattered and disarranged were the stuffs that you see here? In fact, our garden needs a new look soon. Something that is quite appealing and charming. This was taken last year in summer. This lawn space will be transformed into a charming outdoor living room this coming summer season. For sure, I will share some pictures when it is done. I also wanted to put here a new garden set. Watch out for its new look in summer.

Design Inspiration: Five Ideas For Your Garden

1) Fauna and Flora

With the simple addition of adding fauna and flora to your garden, you can completely change the look of your garden into something spectacular. Going for a lush look? If you have a shady garden to begin with, adding some ferns or ornamental grasses is a wonderful way to beautify your garden. With just the right colors of flowers in full bloom you can have an eye catching array of flora. Keep in mind leaves of plants can always add a bit of zeal to a listless garden depending on type when flowers are not in bloom.

2) Sculpture

Adding a piece of sculpture here and there in your garden is a great way to accent a plain area into something more. Garden gnomes aside, there are many stone masons who craft beautiful and long lasting images, they can range from modern and contemporary garden ornament pieces to more traditional and Neo-classical designs of varying sizes.

3) Water Features

Water fountains, either simple or elaborate can bring lusciousness to your garden. In conjunction with fauna in a secluded part of garden you can have a peaceful area that is calming to look at. Even the simple feature of adding a bird bath can give many moments of enjoyment by watching birds flock to it to bathe.

4) Tiered gardens

Bringing levels to your garden adds a complexity and can draw the eye to many different focal points. Planter and gardening boxes can be hung or arranged strategically throughout and is perfect if you would like to have more mobility in designing the grounds.

5) Inspired Moments from Traveling

If you're an avid traveler or had a grand experience visiting part of the world, why not have your garden reflect the sights of what you've seen? Perhaps bring a bit of a specific culture into your backyard as a means to remember fond moments in your travels? Gerniums reminiscent of Italy, a Buda from Asia, even if you haven't traveled there, you can capture the feelings and images that are very familiar of that part of the world.

Photo by: RB

Beautiful Garden

We happened to pass this house as we drove to a friend last August 20, 2009. The beautiful flowers that we saw in their garden are astonishing. I am glad, I was able to take a snapshot of it. here it is!

Flamingo Flowers or Anthurium

We are back to give you some flower update! We have here a pink Anthurium also known as Flamingo flowers or Bloy Flower. We took this photo during our visit to the garden center last week. Anthurium belongs to Arum family or Araceae. Most Anthurium flowers can be grown indoor and outdoor in mild climates with shady spots. These are another beautiful kind of flowers!

Scientific classification:

Kingdom: Plantae
(unranked): Angiosperms
(unranked): Monocots
Order: Alismatales
Family: Araceae
Tribe: Anthurieae
Genus: Anthurium

Glamorous Phalaenopsis Orchid

A kind of orchid that I always love, the Phalaenopsis. Another photo we took at the garden center. We already have two colours of this kind of orchids at home. We wish to share it once the photos are already uploaded. This kind of orchid is one of the most popular in its kind. Sometimes we wonder how these beautiful creature came into existence..or probably the law of nature created it. But we believed that there is someone who is in charge of creating it, no other than the Creator of the Universe. have fun viewing this glamorous creature!

Scientific classification:

Kingdom: Plantae
(unranked): Angiosperms
(unranked): Monocots
Order: Asparagales
Family: Orchidaceae
Subfamily: Epidendroideae
Tribe: Vandeae
Subtribe: Aeridinae
Alliance: Phalaenopsis
Blume
Genus: Phalaenopsis

What Are Perennial Plants

The Authors of this site are not expert gardeners. We just love gardening and love to plant fruits, plants and flowers. We have some in our garden but not all. We have been looking and buying for perennial plants the past weeks. We just need these kind of plants so that they will grow again after winter time. To have more idea about these plants, we consulted the experts from wikipedia about this. This is also for general information if ever you are searching for this kind of plants.

"A perennial plant or perennial (Latin per, "through", annus, "year") is a plant that lives for more than two years. When used by gardeners or horticulturalists, this term applies specifically to perennial herbaceous plants. Scientifically, woody plants like shrubs and trees are also perennial in their habit.

Perennials, especially small flowering plants, grow and bloom over the spring and summer and then die back every autumn and winter, then return in the spring from their root-stock rather than seeding themselves as an annual plant does. These are known as herbaceous perennials. However, depending on the rigors of local climate, a plant that is a perennial in its native habitat, or in a milder garden, may be treated by a gardener as an annual and planted out every year, from seed, from cuttings or from divisions.

LIFE CYCLE

Perennial plants can be short-lived (only a few years) or they can be long-lived, as are some woody plants like trees which can live for over 3,000 years. They can vary in height from only a few millimeters to over 100 meters tall. They include a wide assortment of plant groups from ferns and liverworts to the highly diverse flowering plants like Orchids and Grasses.

Plants that flower and fruit only once and then die are termed monocarpic or semelparous. However, most perennials are polycarpic, flowering over many seasons in their lifetime.

Flowers in Landesgartenschau in Neumarkt

Me and my wife visited yesterday the Landesgartenschau or City Garden in Neumarkt. We had fun going around while taking pictures of the different flowers, bushes and trees and at the same time enjoying the scenery of nature. It was a very beautiful day. We have a blue violet flower here. We need you help to indentify this. We are not sure if this is called Syringa or Flieder Blumen in German. any idea out there?..Thanks in advance!
Thanks to Gracieanne for sharing the name of this flower..It is called Lilac or Flieder in German. Tried to visit you Gracieanne but it seems that you profile is private.

Primula Flowers

Primula flowers are one of the flowers we saw in spring time. The one we have here was taken somewhere down a tree near our doctor's clinic. Primula comes from a Latin word which means first or prime and are among the flowers to open first in spring time. I already saw different colors or primula from yellow to red, purple, pink or white. These are very lovely flowers!

Lovely Narcissus jonquilla.

We found these flowers as we visited our doctor last April of this year. There is a garden on the side of the clinic and I took a photo of it! Lovely flowers!

Characteristics of Narcissus jonquilla and its allies clearly evident; flowers are small to medium sized, perianth segments are flat, corona length varies but is usually short and semi-spherical, foliage may be rush-like and dark green as in the species but phenotypic distillation through crossbreeding between divisions has produced a range of foliage types. Fragrance is usually prominent. Flowers may be borne one to several to a stem, depending upon cultivar.

Flamingo Flowers or Anthurium

I grow Flamingo flowers of Anthurium in our garden before. Now I don't have it anymore. I took a photo of it as we visited a garden center last time. This is a very beautiful flower!

Scientific Clarification
Kingdom: Plantae
(unranked): Angiosperms
(unranked): Monocots
Order: Alismatales
Family: Araceae
Tribe: Anthurieae
Genus: Anthurium

Anthurium (pronounced /ænˈθjuːriəm/) (Schott, 1829), is a large genus of about 600- 800 (possibly 1,000) species, belonging to the arum family (Araceae). Anthurium can also be called "Flamingo Flower" or "Boy Flower", both referring to the structure of the spathe and spadix.

TROPICOS lists 1901 types, although some of these are duplicates. It is one of the largest and probably the most complex genus of this family; certainly it is one of the most variable. Many species are undoubtedly not yet described and new ones are being found every year. The species has neotropical distribution; mostly in wet tropical mountain forest of Central America and South America, but some in semi-arid environments. Most species occur in Panama, Colombia, Brazil, the Guiana Shield and Ecuador. According to the work of noted aroid botanist Dr. Tom Croat of the Missouri Botanical Garden, this genus is not found in Asia. Some species have been introduced into Asian rain forests, but are not endemic. source: wikipedia

Beautiful Sunflower

We don't plant sunflower in our garden this year. The last time we planted it was three years ago. Hopefully next year, we can plant some.

Description of Sunflower
What is usually called the flower is actually a head (formally composite flower) of numerous florets (small flowers) crowded together. The outer florets are the sterile ray florets and can be yellow, maroon, orange, or other colors. The florets inside the circular head are called disc florets, which mature into what are traditionally called "sunflower seeds," but are actually the fruit (an achene) of the plant. The inedible husk is the wall of the fruit and the true seed lies within the kernel.

The florets within the sunflower's cluster are arranged in a spiral pattern. Typically each floret is oriented toward the next by approximately the golden angle, 137.5°, producing a pattern of interconnecting spirals where the number of left spirals and the number of right spirals are successive Fibonacci numbers. Typically, there are 34 spirals in one direction and 55 in the other; on a very large sunflower there could be 89 in one direction and 144 in the other. This pattern produces the most efficient packing of seeds within the flower head.

I took this photo as we visited a garden center this month.

Kingdom: Plantae
(unranked): Angiosperms
(unranked): Eudicots
(unranked): Asterids
Order: Asterales
Family: Asteraceae
Subfamily: Helianthoideae
Tribe: Heliantheae
Genus: Helianthus
Species: H. annuus
Binomial name:
Helianthus annuus

Tiger Lilies in Our Garden

We have different colors of Lilies in our garden. The orange tiger lilies are still blooming until now. The yellow colored ones are slowly fading now. I bought another colors but still don't know its colors until it will bloom..hopefully next week. I hope that they are pink and white this time. here are the tiger lilies in our garden! they wet as I took the photos.

The genus Lilium are herbaceous flowering plants growing from bulbs. They comprise a genus of about 110 species in the lily family, Liliaceae. They are important as large showy flowering garden plants. They are important culturally and in literature in much of the world.

Some species are sometimes grown or harvested for the edible bulbs.

The species in this genus are the true lilies. Many other plants exist with "lily" in the common English name, some of which are quite unrelated to the true lilies.

Gloxinia- Sinningia Hybrid

Sinningia (pronounced /sɨˈnɪndʒiə/) is a genus of flowering plants in the family Gesneriaceae. There are about 65 species of tuberous perennial herbs, all occurring in Central America and South America, with the greatest concentration of species occurring in southern Brazil.

I have here a photo which I took in a garden center. I love the color of these flowers! awesome!

The best-known species, Sinningia speciosa, was originally introduced to cultivation as Gloxinia speciosa and is still commonly known to gardeners and in the horticultural trade as "gloxinia". The true genus Gloxinia is distinguished by having scaly rhizomes rather than tubers.

Sinningia species often grow on rocks or cliffs and most are pollinated by hummingbirds or bees but Sinningia brasiliensis is bat-pollinated, and Sinningia tubiflora, with large, powerfully fragrant tubular white flowers, is apparently pollinated by sphinx moths. Most of the species have large, brightly colored flowers because of this, numerous species and a large number of hybrids and cultivars are cultivated as houseplants. Some species with particularly large tubers are cultivated by cactus and succulent enthusiasts as caudiciforms. One such example is Sinningia leucotricha, often listed under the older name Rechsteineria leucotricha and dubbed "Brazilian edelweiss" for its covering of silvery, silky hairs. Other species with large tubers are Sinningia iarae, Sinningia lineata, and Sinningia macropoda.

The Brazilian genera Paliavana and Vanhouttea, consisting of shrubby plants without tubers, are closely related to Sinningia and recent morphological and molecular analyses (Boggan 1991, Perret et al. 2003) suggest that these genera are, in fact, nontuberous Sinningia species. All three genera were included in tribe Gloxinieae in the classification system of Hans Wiehler but are now recognized in their own tribe, Sinningieae.
Sinningia speciosa, flower about 5 cm across

Numerous genera, including Corytholoma, Rechsteineria and Lietzia, have been synonymized under Sinningia. source: wikipedia

Rhododendron or Azalea Bush

Sometimes I am confused with the different names of a certain flower. Just like this rhododendron flowers. I was trying to find the flower cut-outs that I collected in newspapers or flyers to know the name of the flowers in our garden or flowers that I see in the neighborhood. I finally find the name of this flower. I was just not sure if it is really the right one..Now I finally found it..It is Rhododendron or Azaleas which is also called Azaleen Busch in German. I took this photo in a neighbor's garden as we went walking yesterday.

Azaleas are flowering shrubs making up part of the genus Rhododendron. Originally azaleas were classed as a different genus of plant, but now they are recognised as two of the eight sub-genera of rhododendrons - subgenus Pentanthera (deciduous), and subgenus Tsutsuji (evergreen). Azaleas bloom in spring, their flowers dying only a few weeks later. They do not need as much sun as other plants; they live near trees and sometimes under them.

copyright photo of the Author of this site

Cultivation
Plant enthusiasts have created azaleas for hundreds of years. This human genetic modification has produced over 10,000 different cultivars which are propagated by cuttings. Azalea seeds can also be collected and germinated.

Azaleas grow best in well-drained soil or in plant pots in a cool, shady position. They are easily damaged by excessive soil moisture and grow best in acidic soil (4.5 - 6.0 pH).[2] Fertilizer is optional, although some species do need regular pruning.

White Jasmine in Our Garden

Spring time is here. Plants and trees are starting to bloom flowers now. Most plants I saw around our place are bearing flowers now. A lovely time of the year! These are the white jasmine flowers in our garden. It smells so good! have fun viewing!

copyright photo taken by Euronics with Sony Cybershot DSC-W110

Jasmine (Jasminum, pronounced /ˈdʒæzmɨnəm/, from Old French Jasmine which is from the Persian yasmin, i.e. "gift from God", via Arabic is a genus of shrubs and vines in the olive family (Oleaceae),with about 200 species, native to tropical and warm temperate regions of the Old World. The majority of species grow as climbers on other plants or on structures such as chicken wire, gates or fences. The leaves can be either evergreen (green all year round) or deciduous (falling leaves in autumn).

Cherry Tree in Our Garden

photo by: Eurostar
My wife loves this Cherry. She is happy when the spring time comes so that its flowers start to bloom and become fruits later.. I will try to post the fruits next time..Promise!!

Flowers in Our Garden

photo by: Eurostar

The beautiful tulip in our garden. Photo taken last April by my wife.