Did you know that most mistletoe grows in cider producing orchards in Somerset, Gloucestershire, Hereford and Worcestershire?
(image: mistletoe insects Ixapion variegatum and the Anthocoris visci)
So the shrinking of orchards has affected its related industries such as mistletoe harvesting techniques, the BBC reported. This as well as less mistletoe.
However to reduce this decline, Natural England and the National Trust began supporting small cider producing industries in 2009 with over half a million pounds for thirty orchards.
Every year at Christmas, windowsills become decorated with Pionsettias, but why are they one of the most festive plants?
Initially a part of a myth of central american origins, poinsettias were later taken to the USA and marketed, brought there by the first American ambassador to Mexico, a Joel Roberts Poinsett.
The Poinsettia plant is tied up with a touching myth, that of a poor girl who tries to offer what she can to the Virgin Mary on Christmas Eve. She pulls up some weeds that then burst into bright red poinsettia flowers.
The story is explained fully on Victoria's backyard site, being told by a London journalist and avid gardener, Victoria. She also opens her Wandsworth garden under the National Gardens scheme.
There will be refreshing colours of flowers in Manchester city centre from a new flower festival for community and public alike in July 2012.
The show is set to be take place a week later than RHS Tatton Park, Manchester's present flower festival. It will run from 23 to 29 July, and will be around the cathedral, the National Football Museum and the Arndale Shopping centre.
According to this year's Big Butterfly count the number of people taking part was almost double that of 2010 but the sightings were down by 11% due to the 'cold and often unsettled summer weather'.
The customary behaviour of other insects and plants has been shaken around this year, including an unusual Dahlia in the South West of England.
Botanists from the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew and the Netherlands Centre for Biodiversity Naturalis have described the first night-flowering orchid known to science. The discovery is published in the Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society.
The new night flowering species, Bulbophyllum nocturnum, from the island of New Britain near Papua New Guinea, is the first known example of an orchid species with flowers that consistently open after dark and close in the morning. Its flowers last just one night only.
A relatively small number of plant species have flowers that open at night and close during the day. Until now, no orchids were known among them. This in spite of the fact that many orchids are pollinated by moths. But these moth-pollinated orchids all have flowers that remain open during the day, even if they are mainly pollinated after dark.
It was just two and a half hears ago that Palmstead Nurseries made tentative steps into the internet but their decision to register with the CompeteFor Olympic portal has paid off for them and now they are producing sixty thousand plants for part of the landscaping London 2012.
Marketing manager, Nick Coslett, says that they've had a some difficulty tracking down some of the plants for the 2012 collection and talks of the compass plant, which flowers at two metres and its leaves face south and west, that native Indians used for navigation and believes will be plucked from obscurity because of the Olympics 2012.
A survey of plants of the Parque Estadual Cristalino in north-eastern Brazil has seen the discovery of five species new to science.
Scientists at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and the University of São Paulo have been working on a collection of specimens from the region, with a red-flowering Passiflora cristalina one of the highlights.
The Kew Gardens' website has details of this new species of passion flower which is a scrambling vine growing up to four metres high.
The plant's edible fruits are egg-shaped, juicy and pale green with darker markings.
Travel broadens the mind. At least, it broadens your gardening experience. On a recent visit to Frankfurt, I was interested to see on several city balconies garden plants I would not have thought would be hardy there – acacias, Albizia julibrissin and olives as well as bananas and the Chusan palm (Trachycarpus fortunei) writes Andrew Mikolajski.
Growing – spectacularly – to cascade down a wall from an upper storey (rather than clamber up it), the climbing hydrangea, Hydrangea petiolaris, rather took my breath away. Being deciduous, this, of course, is perfectly hardy – but you hardly expect to come across it in the middle of a city.
If your garden plan involves lots of scrappy bits of paper with notes on what you've planted, then a new website might be able to help out.
MyGarden.org enables you to create an online record of the plants in your garden, but also offers tips on their upkeep and lets you pass on your own advice to others.
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