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Beautiful Malva sylvestra

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Wordless Wednesday

malvasylvestra

There are many types of plants that fall into the family Malva – Hibiscus, cotton plants, mallows, okra and even Hollyhocks.

I grow several types of Malva in my garden and indoors – three types of hibiscus, two mallow species and at least four different types of hollyhocks.

All of this plants have simple yet wide open flowers.

I love the Malva sylvestra that I’ve posted above. It’s very easy to grow, seeds itself and spreads easily but not so much that one would call it invasive, and tolerates lightly shaded areas well.

The delicate stripes on the flowers of M. sylvestra are what drew me to this plant in the beginning and it’s ease of care are one of the reasons why I plan to keep it in the garden for years to come.






Even my wedding band has a garden theme

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You know, I was just trying to decide how long I’ve been interested in gardening and I’ve decided that to some degree, I must have had an interest even as a young child. I can remember helping my parents in our home gardens and at the two gardens we had at our cottage. I might have complained a bit about it every now and then, but once I got working helping to pull the weeds or planting seeds and watching the new plants grow I discovered that I actually enjoyed what I was doing.

Chris and I have beautiful wedding bands, and even these I realize have a bit of a garden theme to them. Well my band does anyway.

We didn’t go the route of choosing wedding rings the way most couples do. Chris and I were both jewelers at the time – not sellers of jewelry but the people who actually make jewelry. It’s very bad luck for jewelers to make their own wedding bands, so as a gift, our brother in law who was also a jeweller, hand crafted our beautiful bands on his own as a gift to us.

We did have input into the design- thank goodness! Mine does have a garden theme it’s a concave gold band with hand carved grape vine and grape leaves intertwined around the whole band. Small emeralds and diamonds alternate around the band between the grape leaves. It’s beautiful. I wanted emeralds in my band because I felt they gave me a tie to nature.

Chris band is convex yellow gold with a strip of white platinum encircling the middle of the band. It’s very nice, but sorry no garden theme to his band.

Even though we didn’t choose our wedding bands the traditional way, we did have a traditional wedding. However, we did get a friend to do the flowers and decorations for the pews as she was working at a fantastic flower shop at the time.

Don’t you just love having connections?

Allium

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Chives and Daffodil How many of you planted Allium this fall so it will come up next late spring or early summer?

This is a large genus consisting of more than 700 species of bulbous perennials and biennials that occur in temperate regions of the northern hemisphere and range in height from 4 inches to 5 feet (10 cm – 1.5 m).

Some species are edible, including onions, garlic and chives.

The most ornamental species, which are brightly coloured with beautiful flowers, mostly come from west and central Asia.

Common to the genus is the oniony smell emitted when the leaves are bruised or cut. All species have flowers in an umbel terminating on a small, erect stalk and sheathed in bud by membranous bracts.

Chive blossoms Bulbs can be fat or quite slender but generally produce new bulbils at the base, sometimes also in the flower stalks.

Cultivation:

They prefer a sunny, open position in fertile, well-drained, weed free soil. Both edible and ornamental species have the same pest and disease enemies such as onion fly, stem eelworm, rust and onion white rot. Propagate from seed or bulbils.

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