How To Grow Your Own

How to Grow Your Own Wildflower Garden

A wildflower garden isn’t for everyone but may add something unique to your landscape. Most wildflowers are not hard to grow once you understand their nature. You could start a wildflower bed two different ways: 1) buying plants or seeds from commercial growers; 2) getting them from their native sites. Remember that many are protected by law and cannot be gathered from native sites unless construction projects will be uprooting them.

Great care must be taken when digging wildflowers or they will not survive. A lot of wildflower species have been depleted due to careless uprooting. Your best bet is to purchase hardy wildflowers from a nursery. Nursery-grown plants are generally better suited to your garden than those dug up in the wild.

Success rides planting wildflowers in the same conditions under which they grow naturally. For instance, marsh marigolds, swamp iris, and cattails like boggy conditions. Arbutus, goldenrod, most asters, and daisies, and black-eyed Susans like poor, dry soil. Do not try to grow woodsy shade lovers in the sun. Do not plant sun lovers in the shade and observe the conditions around your home before you try to start a wildflower garden.

A lot of wildflowers like shade and humusy soil. The north side of the house where few tame flowers would grow can be turned into a wildflower bed if the soil is prepared to resemble conditions where shade-loving plants are grown by nature.

Study wildflower catalogs and reference books before planting. Flowers that grow naturally in wooded areas love generous amounts of humus in the soil, and moisture in hot weather.

Spring is perhaps the best time to start a wildflower garden, although some plants can be moved during fall. Success rate is high when moving early-flowering species like Dutchman’s Breeches in fall. The secret is to maintain the soil moist after transplanting, particularly during a dry fall.

Warning! Be careful about putting wildflowers to your front lawn. Some neighbors may object to the “no one lives here look” of a wildflower front yard, and city officials occasionally frown upon wildflower yards and have passed ordinances forbidding them.

How to Choose the Right Gardening Tools

Help Your Valentine’s Day Roses

Help Your Valentine’s Day Roses Last Longer

If you’re lucky enough to receive fresh roses on Valentine’s Day, you’ll want to preserve their beauty for prolonged enjoyment.

Upon receiving your fresh rose bouquet, take them out of the box and place them in water as soon as possible.

Silk Or Real Your Wedding

Silk Or Real? Your Wedding Flower Questions Put To Rest — At Last

Silk or real; what’s a bride to do? For many brides, the question is really perplexing — especially for those who want to mix a dash of “Do-It-Yourself” into their wedding flower preparations.

Obviously, silk comes with some advantages — it’s tough and shelf stable, and the petals won’t come off at the worst possible moment. On the other hand, silk flowers don’t always look real, and they aren’t always a bargain, either.

The fact is, the silk versus real dilemma is more confusing than ever, thanks in part due to the increasing sophistication — and accompanying cost — of silk and latex flowers. To navigate this new terrain, we interviewed Paul Ajao, a professional florist and cofounder of Pure Botanics, a UK-based floral designer who specializes in weddings.

It’s true that artificial flowers have improved. But the quality varies widely from brand to brand. In addition to craft stores, take a look at which brands your local florists are using. After all, their reputation depends on delivering a beautiful result. Also, they might be able to order in artificial flowers for you — ones that you can’t get in the craft
stores.

One brand with a great reputation that florists use regularly is Sia, which you can find in the UK, US and Australia.

When you take close-ups of artificial flowers, yes, it can be pretty obvious that the flowers aren’t real. But this depends a lot on the quality of the artificial flowers you’ve used.

Remember that any shiny surfaces may cause the camera flash to “bounce,” which looks pretty unnatural for flowers. The common off-the-shelf flowers can be pretty shiny.

Well, some of the most common cut flowers, such as roses, gerberas (gerber daisies) and orchids, are available all year round. So you don’t have to worry about seasonality with these flowers.

But others, like peonies, lily of the valley and ranunculus, have a definite season. Expect to pay more if you buy out of season. And the quality may not be as good.

Just to illustrate how important season can be: a florist we know planned her whole wedding around the very brief time in spring when lily of the valley was in season, so she could use fresh!

Personally, we love working with real flowers. But it’s true that silk definitely comes with some advantages. For starters:

- They won’t wilt.
- They’re a lasting memento of your big day.
- They’re easy to transport if you’re getting married abroad.
- You can prepare them long in advance.

The last point’s important if you’re preparing flowers yourself. By their nature, you have to arrange fresh flowers the day before the wedding at the earliest — and usually the morning of. This doesn’t leave you much time to switch gears if you aren’t happy with the results. On the other hand, you can experiment with and arrange silk flowers weeks in advance. That leaves you plenty of time to relax and pamper yourself in the run up to your wedding!

And yes, you can mix artificial and real flowers with great results. A friend of ours loves ranunculus and wanted them in a mixed bouquet with roses and gerberas. Unfortunately, ranunculus was out of season for her wedding date, and would have cost a lot. So she opted to tuck artificial ranunculus into a fresh bouquet. The results, and the photos, were beautiful.

Contrary to popular opinion, don’t think that silk flowers are always going to be cheaper than real. Many of the quality ones are as expensive as the real thing — if not more.

Paul Ajao is co-founder of Pure Botanics, located in Coventry, central England, UK. Blake Kritzberg edits FavorIdeas.com. Stop by for garden wedding favors.

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Help Your Valentine’s Day Roses

Help Your Valentine’s Day Roses Last Longer

If you’re lucky enough to receive fresh roses on Valentine’s Day, you’ll want to preserve their beauty for prolonged enjoyment.

Upon receiving your fresh rose bouquet, take them out of the box and place them in water as soon as possible.