Picking Healthy Plants For Your Garden

Lawn ... The term lawn, referring to a managed grass space, dates to no earlier than the 16th century. Tied to suburban expansion and the creation of the household aesthetic, the lawn is an important aspect of the interaction between the natural environment and the constructed urban and suburban space...

Sacred Grove ... In central Italy, the town of Nemi recalls the Latin nemus Aricinum, or "grove of Ariccia", a small town a quarter of the way around the lake. In Antiquity the area had no town, but the grove was the site of one of the most famous of Roman cults and temples: that of Diana Nemorensis, a study of which served as the seed for Sir James Frazer's seminal work on the anthropology of religion, The Golden Bough...

Biological Dispersal ... Biological dispersal may be contrasted with geodispersal, which is the mixing of previously isolated populations (or whole biotas) following the erosion of geographic barriers to dispersal or gene flow (Lieberman, 2005; Albert and Reis, 2011). Types of dispersal At some time during its life, an organism, whether animal or plant, moves, or is moved, so that it or its offspring do not die exactly where they were born...

Flower ... These modifications have significance in the evolution of flowering plants and are used extensively by botanists to establish relationships among plant species...

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...

Plant Hormone ... Hormones are vital to plant growth, and, lacking them, plants would be mostly a mass of undifferentiated cells... They are used to regulate the growth of cultivated plants, weeds, and in vitro-grown plants and plant cells; these manmade compounds are called Plant Growth Regulators or PGRs for short...

Bryophyte ... Although a 2005 study supported the traditional view that the bryophytes form a monophyletic group, the preponderance of currently available evidence suggests that the hornworts are sister to vascular plants and liverworts are sister to all other land plants, as shown in the cladogram below... embryophytes tracheophytes hornworts mosses liverworts bryophytes When extinct plants are taken into account, the picture is slightly altered... There are extinct land plants, such as the horneophytes, which are not bryophytes, but also are not vascular plants since like bryophytes they do not have true vascular tissue...

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)... Definition Plants are one of the two groups into which all living things have been traditionally divided; the other is animals... The division goes back at least as far as Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC) who distinguished between plants which generally do not move, and animals which often are mobile to catch their food...

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...

Species Distribution ... Biogeography is the study of the distribution of biodiversity over space and time. It is very useful in understanding species distribution through factors such as speciation, extinction, continental drift, glaciation, variation of sea levels, river capture and available resources...

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...

Italian Renaissance Garden ... In the late Renaissance, the gardens became larger, grander and more symmetrical, and were filled with fountains, statues, grottoes, water organs and other features designed to delight their owners and amuse and impress visitors. The style was imitated throughout Europe, influencing the gardens of the French Renaissance and the English garden...

Shrubland ... Shrubland species generally show a wide range of adaptations to fire, such as heavy seed production, lignotubers, and fire-induced germination. Shrubland as a botanical structural form In botany and ecology a shrub is defined as a much-branched woody plant less than 8 m high and usually with many stems...

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. The stalk of each single flower is called a pedicel...

Algae ... Though the prokaryotic cyanobacteria (commonly referred to as blue-green algae) were traditionally included as "algae" in older textbooks, many modern sources regard this as outdated as they are now considered to be bacteria. The term algae is now restricted to eukaryotic organisms...

Phytogeography ... Gross patterns of the distribution of plants became apparent early on in the study of plant geography...

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...

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... Historically, insects have been the most significant herbivores, and the evolution of land plants is closely associated with the evolution of insects... The study of plant defenses against herbivory is important, not only from an evolutionary view point, but also in the direct impact that these defenses have on agriculture, including human and livestock food sources; as beneficial 'biological control agents' in biological pest control programs; as well as in the search for plants of medical importance...

Spermatophyte ... A middle Devonian precursor to seed plants from Belgium has been identified predating the earliest seed plants by about 20 million years... Runcaria has all of the qualities of seed plants except for a solid seed coat and a system to guide the pollen to the seed... Relationships and nomenclature Further information: Gnetophyta#Classification Seed-bearing plants were traditionally divided into angiosperms, or flowering plants, and gymnosperms, which includes the gnetophytes, cycads, ginkgo, and conifers...

Fern ... The term pteridophyte also refers to ferns and a few other seedless vascular plants (see classification section below)... Ferns first appear in the fossil record 360 million years ago in the Carboniferous but many of the current families and species did not appear until roughly 145 million years ago in the early Cretaceous (after flowering plants came to dominate many environments)...

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...