Wes Porter is a horticultural consultant and writer based in Toronto. Wes has over 40 years of experience in both temperate and tropical horticulture from three continents.
"Apart from cheese and tulips, the main product of the country is advocaat, a drink made from lawyers," claimed Alan Coren of Holland in The Sanity Inspector, 'All You Need to Know About Europe.' (1974). Perhaps, but in gratitude for sheltering members of their royal family during World War II, the Dutch made a gift of tulip bulbs to Ottawa.
It is considerably unfair that this devastating disease is so named. First officially identified in France in 1918, soon after that in Holland, Belgium and Germany, it had reached England by 1927. But it was Dutch botanists who discovered the cause: a pathogenic fungus, Ceratocystis ulmi, spread by two beetles, Scolytus multistriatus and S. scolytus.
Mary, Mary, quite contrary, How does your garden grow? "I live with my brat in a high-rise flat, So how in the world would I know?"
"The birch path is one of the prettiest places in the world," observed Lucy Maud Montgomery in her classic Anne of Green Gables. Artists Tom Thomson and Lawren Harris both painted birch growing in natural settings. Certainly, whether in a garden setting or wild in the woods, there is something about birch that appeals to the Canadian psychic.
Ah spring . . . the whirring of lawnmowers . . . the smell of fresh cut grass . . . the sirens of ambulances carrying the injured away . . .
According to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, each year, 800 children are run over by riding lawn mowers or small tractors and more than 600 of those incidents result in amputation;
Botanists studying mycoheterotrophic plants were recently excited by the discovery of one missing for some 150 years. Thismia neptunis was first found in 1866 in the wilds of Sarawak. Now Czech researchers have announced its rediscovery in the journal Phytotaxa.
"What two ideas are more inseparable than beer and Britannia?" asked Sydney Smith in 1934. It will doubtless come as a shock to many, be that as it may, that hop-flavoured beer took a couple of centuries to arrive in England.
"Into each life a little rain must fall" observed the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, although probably not with April showers in mind--or that rain is a four-letter word.
"Lilies of all kinds, the flower-de-luce being one!" --William Shakespeare The Winter's Tale
Apologies to you Will, but the symbol of France is no lily but instead a stylized iris. A lily by any other name might still be a lily though, right? Sorry, most definitely not. Many a flower, although welcome in the garden, masquerades under a nom-de-plume. Common examples are Lily of the Valley (Convallaria) and Daylily (Hemerocallis).
A selection of ancient and otherwise beliefs perhaps still held by some. Of course, they aren't true and could never happen--touch wood.
As Easter approaches, stores are filled with potted palms. Florists luxuriate in fronds of the same. For Christians, Palm Sunday as special significance as the start of Holy Week.
Many are the wonders that Ireland has brought us. St Patrick and poteen, poets and potatoes and, of course that ancient Hibernian anesthetic, the shillelagh.
The first woman to circumnavigate the world was an eighteenth-century botanist. True, Jeanne Baret lacked a formal, academic education. Nevertheless, she became recognized, if somewhat belatedly, with a government pension and still more recently with that ultimate in scientific acknowledgement, a plant species.
All good Irish along with many other envious mortals celebrate 17th March as St. Patrick's Day. Even the English agriculturalist William Cobett admitted, "The Irish people are brave, generous, hospitable, laborious, and full of genius." Better still for the horticultural fraternity, it is also the day dedicated to St. Gertrude of Nivelles (d.659) virgin and abbess whose name is invoked for gardens. Ask then, as they did in Finian's Rainbow, 'How Are Things in Glocca Morra?' and maybe, just maybe, leprechauns like Og will answer, or so maintains Irish tribal folklore
Moth orchids--Phalaenopsis--are everywhere these days. From supermarket to local grocery store if you want one, you won't have far to go.
Planning for a home vegetable garden this spring? Spare a thought for the French Sun King's Potager du Roi at Versailles. Louis XIV (1643-1715) needed his 25 acres to support his vast court numbering some 10,000 nobles, officials and servants of every rank and pomposity.
Late last year a California visitor to Montreal was hospitalized with cyanide poisoning after treating himself to a package of apricot kernels. He survived. A week later it was reported that a 70-year-old Vermont retirement home resident had been arrested for attempting to poison other residents with home-made ricin. None succumbed.
Controversy has accompanied neonicotinoid pesticides ever since their commercial introduction in the mid-1990s. Discovered by Japanese researchers at a Bayer lab in Tokyo while working on an earlier, 1970s, pesticide created in California, it was released as imidacloprid in the 1990s. Within a decade it, along with clothianidin, also made by Bayer, and thiamethoxam from Syngenta, were accounting for 25 percent of all global insecticide sales.
In a Grimm Brother variation of the well-known tale Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the heroine is called Snowdrop. Her royal stepmother attempts to discover the future with a fairy looking-glass, which tells her:
Thou, queen, art fair, and beauteous to see, But Snowdrop is lovely far than thee!
William Cowley aboard the ship Cygnet in the South Atlantic during his voyage of circumnavigation 1683-86 described how the fourteenth of February brought a "violent storm." Cowley describe how, being Valentine's Day, they were discoursing the intrigues of women when the tempest began. It lasted for over two weeks . . . The men concluded that "the discoursing of women at sea was very unlucky" and "occasioned the storm."