Themed Christmas Trees Make Yours Unique

French Formal Garden ... Beginning in 1528, King Francis I of France created new gardens at the Chateau de Fontainebleau, which featured fountains, parterres, a forest of pine trees brought from Provence and the first artificial grotto in France...

Mesoamerican World Tree ... Directional world trees are also associated with the four Yearbearers in Mesoamerican calendars, and the directional colors and deities... It is supposed that Mesoamerican sites and ceremonial centers frequently had actual trees planted at each of the four cardinal directions, representing the quadripartite concept...

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...

Chinese Garden ... 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...

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...

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...

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...

Flowering Azaleas, Camellia, Crepe Myrtle (Crape Myrtle), And Other Important Landscape Shrubs ... Some of the flowering shrubs that are grown for flowers are also evergreen, such as: Albelia, Azalea, Banana shrub, Bottlebrush, Bridal Wreath, Gardenia, Ligustrum, Oleander, and Tea Olive. Azaleas and Camellias are the most important of the flowering shrubs. Flowering Evergreen ShrubsAzaleas are perhaps the most well known evergreen flowering shrubs grown in America...

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...

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...

Tree Worship ... Various forms of trees of life also appear in folklore, culture and fiction, often relating to immortality or fertility... Other examples of trees featured in mythology are the Banyan and the Peepal (Ficus religiosa) trees in Hinduism, and the modern tradition of the Christmas Tree in Germanic mythology, the Tree of Knowledge of Judaism and Christianity, and the Bodhi tree in Buddhism...

Lycopodiophyta ... Fossils ascribed to the Lycopodiophyta first appear in the Silurian period, along with a number of other vascular plants. Phylogenetic analysis places them at the base of the vascular plants; they are distinguished by their microphylls and by transverse dehiscence of their sporangia (as contrasted with longitudinal in other vascular plants)...

Tree ... Trees are an important component of the natural landscape because of their prevention of erosion and the provision of a weather-sheltered ecosystem in and under their foliage... Wood from trees is a building material, as well as a primary energy source in many developing countries... Trees show a variety of growth forms, leaf type and shape, bark characteristics and reproductive organs...

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...

Forestry ... Silviculture, a related science, involves the growing and tending of trees and forests. Modern forestry generally embraces a broad range of concerns, including assisting forests to provide timber as raw material for wood products, wildlife habitat, natural water quality management, recreation, landscape and community protection, employment, aesthetically appealing landscapes, biodiversity management, watershed management, erosion control, and preserving forests as 'sinks' for atmospheric carbon dioxide...

Wish Tree ... Such trees are identified as possessing a special religious or spiritual value. By tradition, believers make votive offerings in order to gain from that nature spirit, saint or goddess fulfillment of a wish...

Plant Morphology ... First of all, morphology is comparative, meaning that the morphologist examines structures in many different plants of the same or different species, then draws comparisons and formulates ideas about similarities. When structures in different species are believed to exist and develop as a result of common, inherited genetic pathways, those structures are termed homologous...