Garden Pundit

Garden Fall Harvest and Grilled Garden Pizza at The White House Blog

2011-10-06T17:00:00.000+02:00

See The White House Kitchen Garden Fall Harvest and Grilled Garden Pizza.

Garies, Namaqualand, Northern Cape, South Africa, Wild Flowers by Martin Heigan

2011-08-12T15:00:00.000+02:00

Namaqualand wild flowers (north of Capetown, South Africa) by Martin Heigan -- see his Photostream at Flickr.

Hat tip to CaryGEE.

Floridata is a Great Gardening Website with Text and Photography

2010-08-27T14:50:00.001+02:00

Floridata describes itself as:

"[A] photographic encyclopedia of landscape plants, an online plant & nature reference, and a gardening marketplace."

Floridata is a great gardening site with all kinds of text and photographic plant information.

Zantedeschia: The Calla Lilies are in bloom again

2010-08-05T02:48:00.000+02:00

"The Calla Lilies are in bloom again" is a famous cinema line by Katherine Hepburn from the film Stage Door (1937 - see the video excerpt of those lines below). Below that -- from our own garden -- are also our photos of Zantedeschia, the Calla Lily albo maculata (the pristine white calla), a flower also called Lily of the Nile or Arum Lily.

From various postings at the Wikipedia (Zantedeschia, Zantedeschia aethiopica), Floridata.com and AmericanMeadows.com we put together the information that:

Zantedeschia aethiopica, family Araceae, is native to southern Africa but is not a true arum, lily or calla. It is found painted in great quantities in many of Diego Rivera's paintings.

Zantedeschia is toxic to touch and poisonous for ingestion so care should be taken in handling the plant and flowers.

Botany: Earth and its Grasses: Evolution by the Grassroots - Opinionator Blog - NYTimes.com - Olivia Judson

2010-05-10T00:38:00.000+02:00

Olivia Judson at Opinionator Blog gets into basic Botany with a nice piece on Planet Earth and its Grasses at Evolution by the Grassroots, inter alia:

"The role that early grasslands may have played in human evolution is hotly debated. For a good overview of the status of different hypotheses, see Bobe, R. and Behrensmeyer, A. K. 2004. “The expansion of grassland ecosystems in Africa in relation to mammalian evolution and the origin of the genus Homo.” Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 207: 399-420."

Flowers to Attract Hummingbirds

2010-01-19T18:13:00.000+01:00

Flowers to Attract Hummingbirds

by Marie Iannotti, at Marie's Gardening BLog

Planning a Vegetable Garden

2010-01-19T18:12:00.000+01:00

Planning a Vegetable Garden
by Marie Iannotti, About.com Guide to Gardening

Internet offers gardening delights without digging

2010-01-19T18:10:00.000+01:00

Internet offers gardening delights without digging

Garden Bloggers Buffa10

2010-01-19T17:54:00.000+01:00

Garden Bloggers Buffa10

"At long last, we are announcing the 3rd annual garden bloggers' meet-up -- Garden Bloggers Buffa10 -- this year to be held in Buffalo, New York, the home of Garden Walk Buffalo.

Garden Bloggers Buffa10 will be held July 8-11, and we hope you can attend."

Garden Rant: Ethne Clarke and the Makeover of Organic Gardening

2010-01-19T17:52:00.000+01:00

Garden Rant: Ethne Clarke and the Makeover of Organic Gardening

Botany Photo of the Day

2010-01-19T17:50:00.000+01:00

Botany Photo of the Day

BBC - Gardening

2010-01-19T17:45:00.000+01:00

BBC - Gardening
has numerous resources for gardeners
including a monthly calendar image and a gardeners' calendar.

Dick Poffenbaugh: More gardening questions | mansfieldnewsjournal.com | Mansfield News Journal

2010-01-19T17:41:00.000+01:00

Dick Poffenbaugh: More gardening questions | mansfieldnewsjournal.com | Mansfield News Journal:

"There is no end to gardening questions, even during the winter. Here are some timely questions and answers of interest to local gardeners."

Dahlias and Dahlia : The Medicinal and Symbolic Plant of the Aztecs of Mexico, Central America and Colombia : Imported to Europe only 200 Years Ago

2009-04-05T13:38:00.010+02:00

In the garden world, dahlias are "in".

Colleen Laing has put Dahlias together with the rock stars:

"Dahlias are the rock stars of the garden world, loud, gaudy, unpretentious crowd pleasers."

yardz sees as Dahlia renaissance:

"After years in the wilderness, dahlias have become the must have style statement in contemporary gardens."

Dahlias first came to Europe from Mexico, Central America and Colombia only several hundred years ago. See the Dahlia Time Line. D. Sorensenii in Meet the Dahlias - A History at Dahlias.com gives us a short basic dahlia history (referencing the Encyclopedia of Dahlias by Bill McClaren):

"Very little is known about the dahlia prior to the time of the Aztecs. It is said that the Aztecs used parts of the dahlia for food and medicines, but most of this information cannot be verified since much of the Aztec culture was destroyed following the Spanish Conquest.

In 1570 King Phillip II of Spain sent Francisco Hernandez to Mexico to study the natural resources of the country. He stayed for 7 years and described plants that resemble dahlia species under the names, Acocotli and Cocoxochitl. The first drawings were made of the dahlias by an associate who was traveling with Hernandez and were published in 1651. The next time dahlias appear in history is 1789 , the director of the Botanical Garden at Mexico City sent plant parts to Antonio Jose Cavarilles, on staff at the Royal Gardens of Madrid in Spain. From these he grew and flowered 3 new plant forms, Dahlia pinnata, D. rosea, and D. coccinea. He named the genus after Andreas Dahl, a Swedish botanist. Seed and plant parts from Cavanilles dahlias were sent throughout Europe beginning in the early 1800’s. It was during this time that the scarlet Dahlia coccinea was crossed with a mauve-flowered species, possibly D. pinnata, which ultimately resulted in the first modern dahlia hybrid (Lawrence 1929). The new hybrid was easy to grow and hybridize so they quickly became very popular in European and American gardens. Through the 1800’s and 1900’s thousands of new forms were developed, with 14,000 cultivars recognized by 1936 and in the past century, nearly 50,000 named varieties have been listed in various registers and classification lists. All of these dahlia forms were hybridized from at least two, and possibly all three of the original Dahlia species from Mexico. The genus Dahlia consists of 35 species all of which are found in the highlands of Mexico and Central America. Most species have very restricted ranges and are probably rare. Very few are available to the dahlia grower. This is just a brief history, and there is much more information regarding the development of the modern dahlia. Reference: Encyclopedia of Dahlias, by Bill McClaren."

The medicinal and nutritional properties of Dahlia spp., by Glenn Ross Whitley, as published in Volume 14, Issue 1, September 1985, pp. 75-82 of the Journal of Ethnopharmacology, here in the Abstract at PubMed, provide an astounding new glimpse into the world of the dahlia :
"The common garden variety dahlia was once an important root crop and medicinal plant among the pre-Columbian Indians of central Mexico, Yucatan and Guatemala. Its roots were valued both for the nutritious inulin stored inside them and for the antibiotic compounds concentrated in the skin of the tubers. The dahlia flower was a solar symbol worn by Moctezuma and his nobles. In the modern world, dahlias cultivated as a crop might prove to be a worthy food supplement in subtropical areas."

The Mainau Dahlia Vulkan which appears numerously in the header of the Garden Pundit (the photograph at the top of this blog) has been crowned the Dahlia Queen in past years at Mainau and in Hamburg - as Dahlien-Königin-Hamburg in 1993 and as Mainau-Dahlien-Königin in 1975, 1980 and 1981. The floriculturalist (viz. horticulturalist) (Blumenzüchter) was Klaus Pfitzer in Germany in 1974.

We started growing this dahlia with only one package of several bulbs which we bought directly in Mainau at the shop in the year 2000 and the bulbs have multiplied since then to give the panoply of flowers you see in the photograph - not including the dozens of bulbs we have given to friends and neighbors.

The Mainau dahlia Vulkan is very robust and in our garden one very vigorous bulb has reached a height of nearly two meters, although a height of about 1 and 1/2 meters is normal.

We fertilize the bulbs upon planting with special "flower earth" (Blumenerde) and horn chippings (Hornspäne, somewhat comparable to but not the same as bone meal) and water liberally.

We cut the flowers regularly for bouquets in the house and as gifts for friends and neighbors and of course new ones continue to follow those cut. We have had as many as 100 individual flowers flowering at the same time. We plant our dahlias in the Spring and the dahlia plant flowers from mid-summer to late Autumn. In one warm year we still had flowers going into November. We do dig the dahlias out of the ground and store them in the cellar, shaking off the earth around them, but we do not wash the bulbs, so that they retain a protective coating during the winter. We also leave all the stems on the dahlias after cutting them down to about a foot length. In the coming year, after planting and often only after several months, when the stems rot, you can remove them. We have had dahlias which also shoot straight from the stems rather than the bulb itself.

More dahlia information and photographs can be found at these websites:

The United Kingdom National Dahlia Collection
American Dahlia Society
Dahlie.net
Royal Horticultural Society
The National Dahlia Society of New Zealand
Blogs about: Dahlias
Garden Detective
Dahlia
Gardener's Journal
My Dahlia Confessions
iVillage GardenWeb Dahlia Forum
Violet Posy
Info about care for dahlias
Dahlienfeuer (dahlia images)
Gallery of Dahlia Images
Dahlia species
The Garden Helper
Dahlia Days

Do Gardeners Use the Internet Too?

2009-04-05T12:13:00.000+02:00

Do gardeners use the Internet?

Probably not very much in the gardening season.

When summer comes, one of the reasons we do less online work is because we are either playing golf or tending our garden.

Garden Pundit talks about all things gardening and posts garden photographs, but not just of our garden, but of gardens everywhere.