Lotus Flowers - A Beautiful Addition To Your Garden Pond

A lotus flower can be successfully grown in "tubs" in or around your pond. Large containers will work as well. Just be sure to keep them wet, and by wet the professionals mean VERY wet. Usually there should be at least two inches of water above the ground soil in which you plant your lotus flower. They love the soil, however they are very thirsty plants, which is why the garden pond conditions (perhaps particular to your landscape) may be perfect.

There are several kinds of lotus flowers for you to choose from, available on the market today. Increase the luxury and ambiance that a garden pond provides already, by planting lotus flowers - these will bloom impressively and flourish in your personal outdoor sanctuary. Create an even more beautiful place to relax and unwind at home. Perennial plants such as lotus flowers are a great idea for any garden pond. These plants want good soil, however, and humid condition. Nonetheless, it is not absolutely impossible, to adjust them to more dry environmental conditions.

Winds as well as the height of the plant's leaves may bend or become discolored, brown and dry or discolored. So you should care for your lotus plants with a dedicated, continuous observation. If you live in less than ideal conditions, for the safety and beauty of your lotus flowers and overall garden décor, be sure t tend to them properly.

Warm, if not what are considered hot temperatures, are preferred by the lotus plant. Eighty to ninety degrees are actually ideal conditions for this kind of pond life. As with any kind of plant or garden flower, a lotus flower under pf conditions will reach their full, flourishing and most beautiful potential. By their potential I mean the size and condition of the blossoms, as well as the health and fragrance of your pond in general. Of course, this adds to the appeal of your home outdoors and your ability to relax and unwind.

There are several kinds of lotus flowers, such as the "Chinese Dbl Rose" these are described as deep rose colored dbl flowers. They can grow to be up to three feet in height. Because this is one of the smaller lotus flowers, they can be grown in the water in a three gallon container. The Chinese dbl rose is a beautiful sight to see! You would be surprised at the bright color and the ambiance it creates all around you. This rose of a lotus flower may become the center of attraction in your garden pond. But there are many, many more kinds of beautiful garden pond plants on the market for you to choose from, and a long list of lotus, which is what this article will focus on.

The "Empress" or Alba Striata are great flowers. They are a whitish bloom with gentle strokes of pinkish colors on the edges of the petals. These plants can grow up to five feet tall in perfect conditions. The empress lotus flower bursts into a wide white rose-shaped blossom when in full bloom. As all plant life will, the Lotus flower will increase the oxygen in the air. It is also a great way to enhance your g pond and / or landscape design with a water plant which best suits your personal taste.

One of these bright and beautiful flowers is called the "Mrs. Perry D Slocum" and what lovely ladies they are! These flowers are multi-colored and abs el. The first day they appear pink, on the second day they are pink and yellow, by the third day of blooming they are a creamy, flushed pink color. These colors combined are luxurious buds you will certainly love. The Mrs. Perry D. Slocum lotus flower grows to be about four to five feet in adequate conditions. And will decorate your already relaxing outdoor pond with a burst of colorful, fragrant allure.

The lotus flower called "Momo Botan" is a deep, brilliant pink, it will produce double blooms, of truly elegant water blossoms. Older flowers are able to stay open through the night. The blooming season of this wonderful flower will last longer than the average blooming seasons of other flower blossoms, including, lotus lowers. These plants can also be placed in a small cont in your g pond.

The "Lavender Lady" is another lovely member of the family of lotus flowers. These are, as their name indicates produce dark, yet chalkish, and lovely, lavender colored blossoms with a tinge of pink. These beautiful ladies grow to become five to seven feet tall depending on the stability of their conditions. Like all other lotus flowers, you must be attentive to their needs as far as the amounts of water, light, and humidity. The conditions of your environment are only part of it. You can create special conditions when you care for your lotus flower, such as misting the flowers being extra attentive to their intake of water, the health of the surrounding plants, and the flower's overall stability.

Another beautiful lotus bloom is called the Green Maiden. In addition to the elegance and grace of all these decorative females, is the common distinctive shape and color, which vary slightly between the separate species of this flower. In the case of the Green maiden, (as with many lotus flowers) their sequential pattern of color transformation goes from pink to yellow to a cream-color. The final blossom looks as though the tips have been dipped in a bright, yet subtle pink, the yellow can be seen more closely from the center of the bloom. These blooms can grow up to three feet in your g pond.

Another wonderfully named lotus flower is the Frankly Scarlet lotus flower. These are dark pink and a very impressive, colorful, and alluring addition to your pond. These plants can grow to be up to six feet and produce multiple, single blooms. Frankly, the frankly scarlet lotus flower is one of my personal favorites. Treat her like a princess and she will treat you like royalty too. Find our how amazing these flowers will look in your garden pond, not to mention the possible habitats that many kinds of lotus plants will help provide for other wild life.

Single white blooms can also be decorative outdoors in your garden pond, to add that extra splash of life to your landscape. These flowers are lotus flowers called the "Alba Grandiflora" or otherwise known as the "Asiatic." This lovely, cup shaped lotus flower can also grow up to five feet in good conditions. No matter what your outdoor garden motif, if you have a garden pond a lotus flower could be the perfect solution for you. Look at the kinds of flowers available on the market today and decide what you want for very best landscaping you can possible imagine in your outdoor design or garden pond.

Anne Clarke writes numerous articles for websites on gardening, parenting, fashion, and home decor. Her background includes teaching, gardening, and fashion. For more of her articles on pond plants, please visit pond-o-mania.com, supplier of high quality Water Pond Plants and Pond Supplies.

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Garden Tips On Buying The Best, Cold Hardy Flower Bulbs For Outdoor Planting

Buying flower bulbs to plant and grow is an exciting experience that begins in the fall and continues through the spring. Dutch flowering bulbs are usually delivered to American ports by the month of September for fall planting. Major Dutch bulbs offerings include Dutch Amaryllis and African Amaryllis; daffodil bulbs and the famous, Tulip bulbs.

Amaryllis flower bulbs grow the showiest blooms and are pre-cooled to force fast flowering in 3 weeks after containerizing. Dutch bulb importers of Amaryllis offer a larger variety of selections and more bulbs to tempt the buyers. The African growers of Amaryllis bulbs appear to be enslaved to the Dutch Amaryllis importers distribution network, however, the African flowers that emerge on the Amaryllis stems are superior in many respects to the Dutch Amaryllis. The African Amaryllis blooms appear to offer clearer colors, more compact flower stalks, leaves that grow as the flowers appear, and more numerous flower stalks and grow from smaller bulbs. The large array of bloom colors from amaryllis includes red, pink, lavender, orange, yellow, white, green, maroon, red stripe, white stripe, pink stripe, and bi-color. Double numbers of petals on Amaryllis flowers are fast growing to be very popular choices to buy, since the petal count is increased to 12, instead of 6 that grow on most Amaryllis bulb flower stems, looking very similar to a huge carnation flower.

Daffodil flower bulbs are important Dutch bulbs for fall planting, because of their reasonable market cost, the ease of planting, and the growing of flower stalks in the Spring in various colors of yellow, white, orange, and the rare pink daffodil. Daffodil bulbs are easy to naturalize to bloom again every year.

Tulip bulbs are a native flowering plant of Turkey, but long ago tulips were hybridized on a large commercial scale by Dutch bulb growers. The cost of Dutch tulips has not always been inexpensive to buy, but tulip buyers today still love the spring flower colors of red, pink, orange, yellow, blue, purple, white, and bi-color. Cities and government organizations anxiously buy tulip bulbs in huge numbers during winter seasons to grow in beautiful landscape displays for the Spring.

The Canna lily rhizome has been long considered to be tropical in nature, with very little cold hardy resistance. The early American botanist and explorer, William Bartram, wrote in his book, Travels, in 1773, the discovery of Canna indica in Alabama near Mobile, "Canna indica is surprising in luxuriance, presenting a glorious show, the stem rises six, seven, and nine feet high, terminating upwards with spikes of scarlet flowers." Bartram also discovered the native Canna flaccida, growing near Fort Frederica, Georgia, located on the Island of St Simon's. Canna lily colors are broad, red, white, pink, lavender, orange, yellow, speckled, bi-color and others. Some Canna flower growers plant cannas with variegated leaf forms that are striped with red, green, yellow, white, and pink. Dutch distributors of canna rhizomes still flood retail box store, garden centers with "Victorian-age" canna bulbs of poor quality; varieties that had declined, "run out", 50 years ago, and they should have been discontinued and not presented to buyers at a garden center nursery.

Ginger lily rhizomes grow flowers with fragile, delicate blossoms - many looking like miniature orchid flowers. The foliage of Ginger lilies is interestingly variable, growing in colors of green, yellow, maroon, and stripes of yellow or white. Interest in planting ginger lilies has surged in 20 years, because of the realization that many ginger lilies are cold hardy, surviving temperatures as cold as zero degrees F. The foliage and the flowers are pleasantly aromatic.

Daylilies are actually not bulbs but rhizomes, but are sold extensively as daylily bulbs. Thousands of named varieties of Daylily bulbs have been easily hybridized by legions of backyard gardeners and the selection improvement and flower quality is absolutely astonishing. The improvement has resulted in growing double flower daylily, miniature daylily, cold hardy daylilies, and compact clumping or large clumping daylily plants. It is staggering to realize all these many colors - red, white, yellow, orange, purple, pink, and bi-color originated from an original native plant -a seedy, yellow daylily growing wild on the forest edge.

Crinum Lily bulbs offer to an adventurous hobbiest or gardener an antique garden bulb selection that has been reintroduced as improved crinum clones by the brilliant inductiveness of chemist, Lester Hannibal of Fair Oaks, California. Lester Hannibal back crossed and intercrossed many native crinum lily species to offer the gardener an excellent, cold hardy crinum, an "interspecific hybrid", that can be grown as far North as Philadelphia, PA, zone 6, and to survive intense freezes of below zero temperatures. Many of Lester Hannibal's crinum flower hybrids were a re-creation of obsolete but popular commercial crosses that were made by Cecil Houdyshel in the 1930's, but largely improved upon from the original "Powellii" forms with clear, white and pink colors, an increase in the number of flowers in the umbel, extended flowering periods, an eliminatio of drooping flowers, an intensification of fragrance and early flowering after sprouting from the germination of the seed. The "milk and wine" crinum lilies were named, because the flowers were white (milk) and wine striped colors. Crinum colors are burgundy, red, pink, white, greenish-yellow, and orange. Crinum bulbs increase by growing into clumps of multiple offsets from the central mother bulb, or by planting the seed of some cultivars or species.

-Rare, Hard-To-Find Flower Bulbs of Merit- Many rare minor flower bulbs are unavailable to buy anywhere, except by possibly exchanging plants with collectors and hobbiest. The Amazon lily, Encharist grandiflora, blooms with six white, daffodil like petals, and a green or glowing yellow cup radiating from the center. This delicate flower can be remembered from days past for its wonderful charming fragrance. The Bird of Paradise is known for the two tropical forms, the Strelizia reginae, the most common: brilliantly colored flowers with orange, red, and blue glaring blossoms; and the Strelizia nicholae that grows large, showy, white flowers. The Blood Lily, Scadoxus mutliflorus, forms baby-head sized globular flowers with red filamented petals and radiate fragile threads of red that are affixed to the to the center of the bloom, great for container culture. The Red Butterfly lily, Odontonema strictum, won the perennial plant award of the year in Florida in the year 2000, and butterflies and hummingbirds flock to visit the fiery red spikes, beginning in mid-August and continuing until the first hard freeze. The Calla lily, Calla palustrus, has been hybridized with many other Calla lily species to grow into many splendid colors, but the new hybrids are not as popular as the white, fragrant, winter-blooming, Calla aethiopica; and the yellow calla, Calla aethiopica. Clivia lilies, Clivia minata, are choice heavy shade-requiring plants that produce gigantic clusters of orange flowers, cup shaped, with a yellow throat, and often will re-bloom two or three times from large bulbs.

The Gloriosa lilies, Gloriosa rothschildiana, a climbing vine that clothes itself with recurved, star-like flowers that are favored and admired by florists and flower arrangers, because the blooms last so well. The Inca Lily, Alstomeria aurantiaca, has become naturalized in America, as an escaped bulb from the tropical jungles of Peru. The Alstromeria flowers last well as a cut-flower, and waxy, greenish-red funnels begin blooming vigorously in the spring. Lycoris are a charming group of flower bulbs that called "Spider Lily", and they bloom in floral colors of pink, yellow, white, and red, Lycoris radiata, which is the most widely grown. The Pineapple Lily, Eucomis bicolor, grows into flowers that are shaped like miniature pineapple fruits in colors of white and rusty-red. Scilla flower bulbs are grown in large numbers as bedding plants, many Dutch varieties are small and make good cut flowers, but the best cold hardy Scilla is the Scilla peruviana that forms and grows into glowing, purplish-blue flowers that either grow as well as bedding plants, or containerized plants. Voodoo lilies, Amorphophallus bulbifer, are strange and bazaar leafy bulbous plants, both in leaf and flower, with a suggestive look of snakes, cobras, and other vermin that may be lurking beneath the leopard-spotted menacing leaves. Zephyranthes are called "rain lilies", and softly bloom in colors of pink, Zephyranthes grandiflora; yellow, Zephyranthes citrina; white, Zephyranthes atamasco; and a mind-numbing number of Zephyranthes bulb mongrels that are distributed by a retired breeder in San Antonio, Texas, who apparently has nothing better to do, than paralyze all the worlds earnest taxonomists into the task of assembling the records of his Mexican-American bulb-children lineage into a staggering Encyclopedia publication.

Learn more about various plants, or purchase ones mentioned in this article by visiting the author's website: TyTy Nursery

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.

Easy Care, Low and No Maintenance Flowers For Your Flower Garden

Tips for the beginner Gardener

Not all Garden flowers are created equal there are some easy grow easy care flowers that go above and beyond the call of duty, that bloom for months at a stretch. Every sensible Gardener should try to make these types of flowers the foundation of his/her flower garden. When you have areas of color you can rely on each season, you have extra time to invest in feature or specimen flowers that often require more specialized attention. Here are some tried and tested long blooming flowers for your home flower garden.

Rudbeckia (some times referred to as Black-eyed Susan) Perennial Flowers

USDA Zones: 3 - 9 - Bloom Span: 3 Months mid Summer- Mid Fall

Full Sun-Partial Shade

Rudbeckia flowers make themselves at home anywhere and many are native to many parts of North America you often see their bright yellow flowers growing along the banks of highway ditches. These flowers like well-drained, somewhat poor soil and full sun. Deadheading will extend their blooming period, a bonus is the fact that cut Rudbeckia flowers will last a long time in water so make excellent cutting flowers for the cutting garden and to bring into your home for vase displays. Their flowers are attractive to butterflies and bees and their seeds can be eaten by birds during the winter months. They are relatively long lived plants that require very little maintenance and are true easy care flowers, Rudbeckias can be easily multiplied by division. There are many varieties of hybridized Rudbeckia flowers but my favorite and most hardy is Rudbeckia fulgida 'Goldsturm", which are native North American wild flowers. Plants form upright bushy clumps offering a very generous display of brown-eyed, golden-orange daisies from midsummer through the fall. Plants may be easily divided in early spring and transplanted to other garden areas where their bright cheery flowers may add color to a more dreary spot

Veronica spicata (Spike Speedwell) Perennial Flowers

USDA Zones 3 - 9 - Bloom Span: 3-4 Months

These flowers start blooming in the spring and keep going all the way to the first frost. The genus speedwell includes a broad range of flowering plants, but Veronica. spicata is the most popular form chosen for most garden environments. It forms a low growing dense mass of dark green foliage from which arise its flowers in narrow upright spikes, many varieties are available bearing flowers in shades of blues, reds, pinks, whites and purples. Removing the faded flower spikes will keep the plants flowers in blossom for much longer. Drought tolerant, Veronica prefers a well-drained soil, excellent for cutting; the flowers are a favorite with butterflies. Clumps should be pruned hard if they get floppy and divided if they become bald in the center; time to divide these flowers is in the fall or early spring.

My favorite- Veronica 'Sunny Border Blue'

Nigella (Love-in-a-Mist/or sometimes love in a puff) Annual Flowers

The Nigella flowers are delicate, feathery, often blue-flowers but can be obtained in shades of pink, purple and white, an annual, displaying delicate fern like foliage and attractive unusual eye-catching seedpods. They self-seed readily and to my mind this feature along with their incredibible beauty is why these flowers deserve inclusion as an easy care low maintenance flowers .They Come into bloom very quickly, if successive sowings are made every two or three weeks in the summer months by saving some of the previous years seed rather than allowing them all to self sow and merely scattering the seed on the soils surface, you will ensure a continuous supply of beautiful and unusual flowers all summer long, Nigella does well in warm or cool areas but prefers a slightly moist soil. you could not find easier to grow flowers ,I seldom rave over annuals to tell the truth there are only a few that I give garden space to but love in a mist is one of them they're a must have flowers for any new gardener.

My favorite-Persian Jewels (seeds) that include flowers from all Nigella's color ranges.

Day lily /Tiger Lily/Ditch lily/Hemerocalis fulva (Perennial Flowers)

The omnipresent Day Lily, found almost everywhere in North America, or at least it is if you live here in Ontario as it is one of the most beautiful of Ontario's wild flowers. a profuse propagator by means of tuberous roots. Transplanting is best in spring or fall, water generously after transplanting .They do not mind overcrowding, as a matter of fact these flowers look their best when in bloom in a large, close knit mass planted groups forming patches of bright orange flowers here and there, dotted around the garden .These wild flowers are incredibly easy to grow just try and stop them. They are at home in nature, or as a back drop or foundation flowers for your home garden. These Day lily's require little to no attention. they provide summer and fall interest and once established are a tall impenetrable ground cover I under plant and inter plant mine with other bulbs that display their flowers when the Day Lily is not blooming, they prefer moist to wet soils, but will grow anywhere sun or shade ,only two years ago I established a large patch in what was largely gravel just off my back patio That's why they grow so well in and near ditches hence one of there common name Ditch Lily, always seems a little insulting to refer to beautiful large star shaped orange flowers by such a demeaning name. Fertilizer is not necessary, except in the poorest of soils. These flowers do not need winter protection and once established, thrive and increase year after year.

For pictures of these plants and for many other easy care low and no maintenance flowers for your flower garden visit my website Gardeners Insights at http://wandasworx.com/gardening

This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating the software to full version.