365 Days of Floral Education - Days 336 - 340

As part of our 125^th Anniversary celebration at Stein Your Florist Co. we are sharing a year of floral education, November 1, 2012 thru October 31, 2013. Each day we will post something new on our Facebook page to share our knowledge of our favorite things, flowers and plants and we'll be updating our blog every 5 days or so. No need for pencils and notebooks, just sharing some simple lessons in floristry.

Day 336 - Pollination systems are biological markets, where flower visitors choose between flower species on the basis of their quality, such as the sweetness and amount of nectar per flower. Plants in turn compete for pollinators and advertise their product through colorful visual displays and scents. A key challenge in floral advertising is that signals must be not only attractive but also memorable. The more distinct a flower signal, the more likely a pollinator is to remember it, increasing the probability that pollinators will visit more flowers of this species while ignoring competitors. Some plant species even gain an unfair advantage in this competitive market by manipulating the memory of bees with psychoactive drugs, namely caffeine.

Day 337 - Diesel pollution snuffs out floral odors, interfering with honeybees' ability to find and pollinate flowers, new research suggests. Honeybees use both visual and olfactory cues to recognize flowers that produce nectar in return for insect pollination. Not all flowers produce nectar, and bees avoid those that don't by learning to recognize the odors of nectar-bearing flowers. But these floral odors — which consist of reactive chemicals called volatiles — react with other substances in the atmosphere; in the presence of certain pollutants, especially those in diesel fuel, these scents can chemically transform into undetectable forms. So give a hoot, don’t pollute!

 
Day 338 - The rose was adopted as England’s flower emblem during the Civil War (1455-1485). Roses symbolized two warring factions in England. Red roses symbolized the Lancaster faction while white roses symbolized the York faction, this clash became known as the War of the Roses.

 

Day 339 - It seems that the French were the first people to first deliver roses. As well it was the French explorer Samuel de Champlain who brought the first cultivated roses to North America in the seventeenth century.





 
Day 340 - The world's oldest living rose bush is thought to be 1000 years old. Today, it continues to bloom on the wall of the Hildesheim Cathedral in Germany. This variety is known as Sunrisa.