365 Days of Floral Education - Days 326- 330

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 326 – We know that leaves get their green color from chlorophyll, but sometimes leaves appear red, such as on a Japanese maple, or have variations of color throughout the leaves, such as croton plants, so where does this come from? Most plants have other pigments:  carotenoids, which appear yellow to orange, and anthocyanins, which range from red to purple, and these pigments may dominate the appearance of the green chlorophyll. So chlorophyll is still present and at work, its color is simply masked.

Day 327 – Flowers began changing the way the world looked almost as soon as they appeared on Earth about 130 million years ago, during the Cretaceous period. That's relatively recent in geologic time: If all Earth's history were compressed into an hour, flowering plants would exist for only the last 90 seconds. But once they took firm root about 100 million years ago, they swiftly diversified in an explosion of varieties that established most of the flowering plant families of the modern world.

Day 328 - Today flowering plant species outnumber by twenty to one those of ferns and cone-bearing trees, or conifers, which had thrived for 200 million years before the first bloom appeared. As a food source flowering plants provide us and the rest of the animal world with the nourishment that is fundamental to our existence. In the words of Walter Judd, a botanist at the University of Florida, "If it weren't for flowering plants, we humans wouldn't be here."

Day 329 - Botanists call flowering plants angiosperms, from the Greek words for "vessel" and "seed." Unlike conifers, which produce seeds in open cones, angiosperms enclose their seeds in fruit. Each fruit contains one or more carpels, hollow chambers that protect and nourish the seeds. Slice a tomato in half, for instance, and you'll find carpels. These structures are the defining trait of all angiosperms and one key to the success of this huge plant group, which numbers some 235,000 species.

Day 330 - Just when and how did the first flowering plants emerge? Charles Darwin pondered that question, and paleobotanists are still searching for an answer. Throughout the 1990s discoveries of fossilized flowers in Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America offered important clues. At the same time the field of genetics brought a whole new set of tools to the search. As a result, modern paleobotany has undergone a boom not unlike the Cretaceous flower explosion itself. We are learning more about flowering plants all the time.

365 Days of Floral Education - Days 26-30

As part of our 125^thAnniversary 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.

Daffodils

Day 26 - Daffodils last longer in shallow water, so when you re-cut their stems and change their water (adding additional floral food) every two or three days, fill the vase only partway. You can leave the protective husks on or gently remove them. When daffodil stems are cut, they release sap that can shorten the life of other flowers. To prevent this, after cutting their stems, place them in a bucket of water for at least 12 hours on their own before mixing them with other flowers. Some modern designs use daffodils with the bulb and roots still intact on the stems. The soil is washed from the root system – and you can enjoy the full botany of the flower from roots to stem, leaves and blossoms.

Sunflowers

Day 27 – Sunflowers are a wonderful cheerful flower that can put a smile on anyone’s face and their seeds are a tasty treat, but did you know their stems also were once used for a rather practical application? Before the advent of modern materials early life jackets used dried sunflower stems for buoyancy. Sunflowers also lent themselves to the Chernobyl nuclear crisis, sopping up dangerous strontium and caesium. Beautiful and useful!








Pine needle tea

Day 28 – Tis the season for pine and we are using tons of it in our shops, but besides looking and smelling great it has some edible qualities too (though we don’t recommend eating our ornamental pine). Some species of pine have large seeds, called pine nuts, that are harvested for cooking and baking. The soft, moist, white inner bark, cambium, found clinging to the woody outer bark is edible and very high in vitamins A and C. It can be eaten raw in slices as a snack or dried and ground up into a powder for use as a thickener in stews, soups, and other foods. This was so common among the Adirondack Indians that they got their name from the Mohawk Indian word atirú:taks, meaning "tree eaters". And a tea made by steeping young, green pine needles in boiling water (known as "tallstrunt" in Sweden) is also high in vitamins A and C.

Flower varieties

Day 29 – On any given day at our flower shops you’ll see more than 100 varieties of flowers, but did you know that there are between 250,000 and 400,000 species of flowers on planet earth, making up 462 different families? Only about 85 percent of these species have been cataloged. There are 1,300 species of begonia alone and approximately 130 species of roses, not including hybrids.

Flower pollination via hummingbird

Day 30 - Fossil evidence suggests that flowering plants have only been around for about 140 million years. This could be because flowering plants are dependent on animals for their reproduction and dispersal. Despite their relative youth, flowering plants, or angiosperms, now dominate the world's plant life. Many fruits and seeds are eaten or otherwise used by people and almost all the plants we use in agriculture are flowering plants.