HEY BUD
Budding Interest
Winter is a good time to look at some of the finer details of trees and shrubs — their buds, for example. Buds!? Bo-o-o-oring, you say? Not really, if you take the time to appreciate details such as their shapes, colors, and textures.
Plum buds about to pop
Buds can do more than just help you wile away winter hours. They can disclose a plant’s identity as well as foretell for you what what’s in the offing for the upcoming growing season as far as flowers and fruits. Read more
TINY TREES
Background
I was admiring my bonsai and thinking what it was going to need in the coming months, so decided to share the process, the plant, its evolution, and needs with you.
My weeping fig
(Some of what follows is briefly excerpted from my book, The Pruning Book, available directly from me, signed, as well as the usual sources. My updated comments are in italics.)
Bonsai (pronounced BONE-sigh) is the growing of plants, usually woody plants, in shallow pots. The art began in China almost two thousand years ago, then was carried to Japan during the Kamakura period (1180-1333), where it was brought to a high state of perfection.
A bonsai planting portrays, in miniature, a natural theme — the rugged beauty of a gnarled pine on a windswept slope, the tranquility of a grove of larches, the joyousness of spring in the cascading branches of an old fruit tree bursting into bloom. Read more
CAT NIPPING, NOT SO GOOD
A Nonsymbiotic Relationship
Cats like houseplants, but houseplants don’t particularly like cats. Or, at least, cats don’t do houseplants any good.
Take my ponytail palm, for example. My cat is an outdoor cat, but I know if she came indoors, what a grand time she’d have jabbing her claws playfully at the ends of the ponytail palm’s wispy leaves. She’d do the same for my orchid’s flower stalk, now weighed down with a row of delicate blooms. Either plant would emerge from such play worn and frayed.
There’s not much you can do once a plant catches your cat’s fancy, except Read more
