The mark of an enthusiastic hobbyist is his constant search to learn more about his hobby. This is certainly true of an enthusiastic gardener.
Witness the abundance of good gardening literature on the market and the attendance at garden forums and flower shows. Or go by any good nursery and watch the amateur gardeners browse around, questioning the growers, snooping into spray tanks, hoping to pick up something new to add to their gardening knowledge.
Lectures About Horticulture And Botany
We find the same enthusiasm at our botanical gardens. Why emphasize horticulture and botany? Because they are basic to all gardening procedures.
As one woman remarked after a class on mineral nutrition, “Now I know why I’ve been fertilizing that way for all these years.”
She knew by experience what to do but not why her efforts resulted in better plant growth. This, then, points out the difference between botany and horticulture.
Difference Between Botany And Horticulture
Botany is the comprehensive study of plants; it tries to define all plant activities, including metabolism, photosynthesis, reproduction, and plant relationships.
Horticulture, on the other hand, takes the findings of the botanist and applies them.
Recently when botanists found that certain organic acids acted as plant hormones in stimulating root production from shoot cuttings, the horticulturist soon began to study how this information could be used in a technique for rooting cuttings in the nursery propagating house.
Keys To Producing Flowering Plants
Gardeners are generally concerned with flowering plants: of course, most of us have a few ferns in the shady corners or some liverworts and mosses growing in the abandoned well, but our grasses, shrubs, annuals, and perennials make up the most part.
All are seed-bearing plants, technically, Spermatophytes. Therefore, our subject will be these seed producers, their structure, processes, and activities.
The goal is to give gardeners the following:
- A background for their gardening activities
- To help them understand what their plants are doing
- To provide them with a glimpse into the mysteries of nature
A flowering plant, be it a giant oak or a miniature rose, is a miracle of development, all keyed to the theme of reproduction.
The ends to which a plant will go to save its species are unbelievable.
Produce Flowers by Pruning The Roots?
The orchardist knows that non-fruiting apple and cherry trees can be made to flower, then fruit, by pruning the roots, thus threatening the tree’s life.
If root pruning fails, he may half-girdle the trunk, and as a final step, he may again half-girdle from the opposite side a foot or less above the original cut.
Plants must not be credited with instinct, but their nature is such that if life is in peril, final resources of stored foods and mineral reserves will be brought up toward producing a flower and its seed.
The seed is for the “seven lean years” of a plant’s life. Plants set seed with the onset of bad times when the plant is endangered.
In the case of annual plants, when the seed is set, the plant usually dies. This is why gardeners often snip off spent blossoms as they stroll through the garden.
Or a gardener may overfeed, overwater and generally stimulate a foliage plant to keep it making leaves and stems, knowing that the plant will set flowers and lose its glamour if austerity sets in.
Ecologists’ Take To Growing Plants In Their Natural Settings
On the other hand, with rare exceptions, you cannot get a seed without a blossom, and usually, the gardener is interested in lots of flowers.
Here we can take advantage of some ecological data. Ecologists are those fellows who study plants in their natural settings.
Ecologists tell us that plants growing near the equator, where day and night are equal, have no seasonal cycles but are foliage-producing only or have a blooming cycle built around periodic rainy spells or else, when mature, they bloom and set fruit with no apparent rhythm.
An example is an orange. Thriving in tropical or subtropical conditions, orange trees are famous for carrying ripe fruit, green fruit, and fragrant blossoms on the same branch.
In reverse, greenhouse growers can change the big dates of flowers by artificially changing the day length, giving longer or shorter nights, as necessary.
In temperate zones, plants have more sharply defined life cycles. Most annuals sprout in the spring, bloom, set seed, and die.
A few winter annuals operate in the same cycle in winter. For example, chickweed sprouts in October flowers with the winter thaws and die with the onset of warm weather.
Or, our perennials awaken in the spring, bloom, set seed, vegetate through the summer, and sleep through the winter.
But the point is this reproduction is the goal, and mother nature can be mighty extravagant in shooting for it.
Look at the millions of seeds an elm produces, a petunia, or an orchid. We will build our course around the structures and processes within a plant to make the continuity of life possible for seed production or from a broader viewpoint.
44659 by Dr. John P. Baumgardt