Posted by admin on October 30, 2008
Unique Gardens not only offer people something to talk about, they also give you a great chance to dialog with people. And mostly, they like it. Stop and consider - don’t you just adore to see an unusual garden?
Usually you can arrive at a fairly good idea of someone’s character simply by considering their gardening ideas. A garden can express whether they are free spirited with color and plants flowering all around or if they are happier with a more conventional and ordered attitude to life.
A conventional garden does not show you anything about the person. But an unusual garden can reveal many varied faces of the character. So go ahead, express yourself!
Designing and planting your garden gives you the opportunity to choose the colors and plants that make you feel good. You can choose to include plants that have scents that you love or that remind you of places that you once lived in.
Just like your clothing, your garden plan will alter along with the time of year. Although gardens adapt by themselves, you have a lot of control. You are able to arrange your yard to enliven a gray season, or to provide shade and cool in a hot summer. Adding colored pots and sculptures can transform a winter garden and add contrast to the more colorful seasons.
You can change the character of the garden as you go through changes in your life so that one year is never the same as the next or you might decide to have it all remain the same, just as an old tree stands from one year to the next.
Many times, a more quiet person may dress in a very conventional style, but they discover they can be much more revealing in their garden so they have unusual gardens. Seeing your garden get a lot of attention is not the same as getting a lot of attention for yourself. Go ahead and try - most people find it is great to have a garden that the world is talking about!
A garden can affect your mood for the better causing you to feel good just being out in it. It can make us understand that the important things in life are the little things that are with us all of the time. A garden is a mass of life and it will always support anybody who wants to share in the beauty of that life.
It is no wonder that so many of us love gardening. The living beauty of a garden shows the perfection of nature and inspires love in everybody. Doesn’t that just make you want to go out right now and creating one of the most vibrant and unique gardens in your area?
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Posted by admin on October 17, 2008
Winter is the season for landscape and garden planning. Yet now is the best time to get out into your garden to take notes and drawings to remind you of its current structure while you are planning for changes months from now. As you walk the perimeter of your yard, you’ll get many different perspectives on the overall space.
Design landscaping is meant to create a setting for your home and garden areas that reflect your personality and make people feel welcomed into your world. Whatever landscape design you choose should reflect your sense of style for the grounds that surround your home, not just parrot the latest photo spread in an upscale magazine (though we love to pour over those gorgeous illustrations in the cold winter months). Your landscape will set the overall tone for your visitors. Landscaping that is well-done can also significantly raise the value of your property.
There are many ways that you can improve the landscaping lawn around your home. Some people worry that to improve their landscape design properly, they need to hire landscape architects or landscape contractors. This can be wonderful if you can afford it, but many people very successfully undertake the landscaping design for their homes on their own. If you are interested in taking on the challenge of doing design landscaping for your home and garden, then the first thing to do is learn some of the basic landscaping design principles.
There are four main aspects to all good landscaping and if you combine them with your own sense of style and attention to detail, then you will be well on your way to making the landscaping around your home unique.
Element One - Balance
The first element of landscaping is the concept of balance. If you concentrate most of your plants in one area, then the rest of your garden landscaping area will look rather neglected.
Distribute the plants around the yard or the garden at least somewhat evenly and with a sense of flow. This will help draw the eye though the entire lawn maintenance design and engage your visitors.
Element Two - Proportion
The second aspect of great landscaping is proportion. The idea here is to make sure that any landscape design feature you choose fits in appropriately, in terms of size, to the surrounding areas, fixtures and structures.
Trying to wedge an huge gazebo into a tiny back yard will end up looking almost comical, and will not provide a great effect. At the same time, if you have an enormous front lawn, then you will need to add larger elements in plantings or features that will be noticed and not overwhelmed.
Element Three - Transition
Transition is the third principle you need to know for your landscaping project and is closely related to proportion. Even though your landscape design can include flowers, plants, large shrubs, bushes and even trees, the way to make them really work together in a beautiful way is with the use of transition.
It is the smooth flow from one type and size of plant to another. You want to lead the eye from delicate plants to larger ones with some in-between sizes. Color transitions can also be a very effective aspect of your overall landscaping design plan.
Element Four - Unity
The last of the four concepts of landscaping is unity and it is the ultimate sense that you are trying to express with your design. All of the choices that you make in how you balance, proportion, and transition the various colors, sizes and textures of your landscape elements should be governed by a unifying theme. This is what brings the landscape design together to work in harmony and create a spectacular home and garden.
It is best to choose a theme for your design landscaping and make sure you stick to it throughout. If you want the look of an English garden, then choose only elements that will fit with that theme. If you prefer the ambiance of a Japanese garden, then only choose features, plants and accents that reflect that theme.
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This article comes to us courtesy of the guys looking out for your garden lawn.
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Technorati Tags: garden plans, landscape design ideas, landscape planning
Posted by admin on October 2, 2008
As much as you may have longed for a handful of aspirin just at the moment of hearing “not tonight, I have a headache,” you certainly don’t want to find them in the garden or the forest. Yet aspirin is there, and unfortunately, it’s there for much the same reason.
Scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) have found that plants in a forest respond to stress by producing a chemical form of aspirin.
“Plants have the ability to produce their own mix of aspirin-like chenicals, triggering the formation of proteins that boost their biochemical defencses and reduce injury,” says NCAR scientist Thomas Karl. “Our measurements show that significant amounts of the chemical can be detected in the atmosphere as plants respond to drought, unseasonable temperatures, or other stresses.”
Scientists have known for years that plants produce a chemical compound known as methyl salicylate (a form of aspirin). What they didn’t know was when and how much was produced into the atmostphere in an uncontrolled environment. When Karl’s team set up monitoring equipment in a walnut grove near Davis, California to check hydrocarbon emissions, they found levels of methyl salicylate rose as the grove came under stress from a local drought, and increased when temperatures dipped at night, then soared the next day.
Karl and his colleagues think that the methyl salicylate has two functions. One of these is to stimulate plants to begin a process known as systemic acquired resistance. This helps a plant to both resist and recover from disease.
They also believe methyl salicylate also may be a mechanism whereby a stressed plant communicates to neighboring plants, warning them of the threat. Researchers in laboratories have demonstrated that a plant may build up its defenses if it is linked in some way to another plant that is emitting the chemical. Now that the NCAR team has demonstrated that methyl salicylate can build up in the atmosphere above a stressed forest, scientists are speculating that plants may use the chemical to activate an ecosystem-wide immune response.
“These findings show tangible proof that plant-to-plant communication occurs on the ecosystem level,” says NCAR scientist Alex Guenther, a co-author of the study. “It appears that plants have the ability to communicate through the atmosphere.”
JRR Tolkein’s mythical tree creatures, the Ents, may not take the form of giant, mobile trees, but may well exist as chemicals wafting on the breeze. And we may learn how to manage our gardens and help protect them from insect or other pest infestations as well as environmental pests as we learn how to tap into this early warning system.
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Technorati Tags: aspirin, chemical communication, communiction, garden pretection, methyl salclate, trees
