Expressions of Love - Flowers

Further Reading: Flowers

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Photoperiodism ... Early inscriptions from this period, carved on tortoise shells, have three Chinese characters for garden, you, pu and yuan. You was a royal garden where birds and animals were kept, while pu was a garden for plants...

Inflorescence ... The stem holding the whole inflorescence is called a peduncle and the main stem holding the flowers or more branches within the inflorescence is called the rachis...

Gardens Of The French Renaissance ... Another influential writer was Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472), who in 1450 wrote a tract, De re aedificatoria for Lorenzo de Medici, he used the geometric principles of Vitruvius to design building facades and gardens. He suggested that the house should look over the garden, and that the garden should have "porticos for giving shade, cradles where vines grow on columns of marble, and there should be vases and even amusing statues, provided that they are not obscene." In his design of the gardens of the Belvedere in Rome, the architect Bramante (1444–1544) introduced the idea of perspective, using a long axis perpendicular to the palace, along which he placed parterres and fountains...

Pollination ... In spite of a common perception that pollen grains are gametes, like the sperm cells of animals, this is incorrect; pollination is a phase in the alternation of generations: each pollen grain is a male haploid plant, a gametophyte, adapted to being transported to the female gametophyte, where it can achieve fertilization by producing the male gamete (or gametes, in the process of double fertilization). As such the Angiosperm successful pollen grain (gametophyte) containing the male gametes (sperm) gets transported to the stigma, where it germinates and its pollen tube grows down the style to the ovary...

French Landscape Garden ... Descriptions of English gardens were first brought to France by the Abbé LeçBlanc, who published accounts of his voyage in 1745 and 1751. A treatise on the English garden, Observations on Modern Gardening, written by Thomas Whately and published in London in 1770, was translated into French in 1771...

Pollinator ... Nectar provides the energy for bee nutrition; pollen provides the protein. When bees are rearing large quantities of brood (beekeepers say hives are "building"), bees deliberately gather pollen to meet the nutritional needs of the brood...

Plant ... Precise numbers are difficult to determine, but as of 2010, there are thought to be 300–315 thousand species of plants, of which the great majority, some 260–290 thousand, are seed plants (see the table below). The scientific study of plants is known as botany...

Pollination Syndrome ... Wind pollination (anemophily) Flowers may be small and inconspicuous, as well as green and not showy... Insects may visit them to collect pollen; in some cases, these are ineffective pollinators and exert little natural selection on the flowers, but there are also examples of ambophilous flowers which are both wind and insect pollinated... Their flowers tend to be small and inconspicuous with lots of pollen grains and large, feathery stigmas to catch the pollen...

Gardening ... Gardening ranges in scale from fruit orchards, to long boulevard plantings with one or more different types of shrubs, trees and herbaceous plants, to residential yards including lawns and foundation plantings, to plants in large or small containers grown inside or outside. Gardening may be very specialized, with only one type of plant grown, or involve a large number of different plants in mixed plantings...

Evolutionary History Of Plants ... Probably an algal scum formed on land 1,200 million years ago. In the Ordovician period, around 450 million years ago, the first land plants appeared...

Plant Morphology ... Flowering Evergreen Shrubs Azaleas are perhaps the most well known evergreen flowering shrubs grown in America. Hybrids of azaleas are now planted in Northern States...

Hedge ... Many hedgerows separating fields from lanes in the United Kingdom, Ireland and the Low Countries are estimated to have been in existence for more than seven hundred years, originating in the medieval period. The root word of 'hedge' is much older: it appears in the Old English language, in German (Hecke), and Dutch (haag) to mean 'enclosure', as in the name of the Dutch city The Hague, or more formally 's Gravenhage, meaning The Count's hedge...

Plant Defense Against Herbivory ... Other defensive strategies used by plants include escaping or avoiding herbivores in time or in place, for example by growing in a location where plants are not easily found or accessed by herbivores, or by changing seasonal growth patterns. Another approach diverts herbivores toward eating non-essential parts, or enhances the ability of a plant to recover from the damage caused by herbivory...

Flower ... In addition to facilitating the reproduction of flowering plants, flowers have long been admired and used by humans to beautify their environment, but also as objects of romance, ritual, religion, medicine and as a source of food... Many flowers lack some parts or parts may be modified into other functions and/or look like what is typically another part... Other flowers have modified stamens that are petal-like, the double flowers of Peonies and Roses are mostly petaloid stamens...

Fern ... By far the largest group of ferns are the leptosporangiate ferns, but ferns as defined here (also called monilophytes) include horsetails, whisk ferns, marattioid ferns, and ophioglossoid ferns. The term pteridophyte also refers to ferns and a few other seedless vascular plants (see classification section below)...

Plant Morphology ... Flowering Evergreen Shrubs Azaleas are perhaps the most well known evergreen flowering shrubs grown in America. Hybrids of azaleas are now planted in Northern States...

Chinese Garden ... Flowers with generalist pollinators tend to have dilute nectar but those that have specialist pollinators such as hummingbirds or sunbirds tend to have more concentrated nectar... The nectar of ornithophilous flowers vary in the sugar composition, with hexoses being high in passerine pollinated species while those that are insect pollinated tend to be sucrose rich... Many plants of the family Loranthaceae have explosive flowers that shower pollen on a bird that forages near it...

History Of Gardening ... After the emergence of the first civilizations, wealthy individuals began to create gardens for purely aesthetic purposes. Egyptian tomb paintings of the 1500s BC are some of the earliest physical evidence of ornamental horticulture and landscape design; they depict lotus ponds surrounded by symmetrical rows of acacias and palms...

Ornithophily ... The reproductive structures are more varied, and are usually specific to a particular group of plants, such as flowers and seeds, fern sori, and moss capsules...

French Formal Garden ... Following his campaign in Italy in 1495, where he saw the gardens and castles of Naples, King Charles VIII brought Italian craftsmen and garden designers, such as Pacello da Mercogliano, from Naples and ordered the construction of Italian-style gardens at his residence at the Chateau d'Amboise. His successor Henry II, who had also traveled to Italy and had met Leonardo DaVinci, created an Italian nearby at the Chateau de Blois...