They're also growing vegetables rather than crops like wheat on floating gardens. They use a bamboo frame and load it with water hyacinth,
They are also reaching gardens and vegetable patches, says Johann Goldammer, a fire ecologist and director of the GFMC.
Many poor people will lose their harvest, which they need to survive the winter, he says.
was conducted by plant scientists at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, UK, and is published today. It finds that gymnosperms
Stephen Hopper, director of the Royal Botanic Gardens, says that the assessment will help countries to measure progress towards new targets to halt loss of the world's biodiversity by 2020,
and with sightings in gardens made by members of the public, she says. Researchers already enlist help from garden clubs
and nurseries to monitor these islands of bee biodiversity, she adds. Scientists at the conference also identified a need for basic research into bumblebee genetic diversity.
Researchers at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, UK, and the Missouri Botanical garden in St louis sorted through 1. 24 million plant names from a number of data sets,
whittling them down to about 300,000 separate species linked to almost 480,000 synonyms. Policy Emissions control The US Environmental protection agency's first controls on greenhouse-gas emissions came into effect on 2 january.
Nature Newsmodern botanic gardens are much more than just attractive strolling grounds. Many have labs in
Hulme says that many invasive plant species escaped from botanic gardens, and that the gardens do not do enough to keep their collections in check.
Hulme got the idea for the research in Tanzania. The field site he was visiting was near a botanic garden
and he could see that many of the plants in the site had come from the garden.
A lot of the species were spreading into the forest, he says. Hulme first looked at the 34 plants on an International Union for Conservation of Nature list of 100 of the worst invasive species. For 19 of the 34,
there was evidence that they may have escaped from botanic gardens. For example, the Brazilian fruiting tree known as strawberry guava (Psidium cattleianum),
is thought to have jumped the fence from the Harold L. Lyon Arboretum in Honolulu in the early 20th century.
back when some gardens were trying to get nonnative or alien plants to naturalize in new places,
whether botanic gardens had cleaned since up their act. To find out, he looked at whether areas with more botanic gardens had more alien plants living there.
He used published accounts of the Gross domestic product, population density and alien species diversity of 26 counties.
Then he added to the mix the number of botanic gardens per unit area using a master list of gardens kept by Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI),
a global network of botanic gardens that is based in London. He discovered that they did,
although the effect was not strong once the prosperity of the region and the number of people living there were accounted for.
But 12%of the variation in alien-plant richness seems to be down to botanic gardens.
High numbers of gardens and alien species might both be the result of some third factor.
Whatever the reason, Hulme thinks the figure should be enough to make garden managers take notice.
According to Hulme, few gardens have signed onto voluntary pledges such as the St louis Declaration, wherein they promise to keep an eye on potential invasive plants,
I just wanted to prick the conscience of botanic gardens, he says. Stephen Blackmore, head of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, UK, says that the botanic-garden community has been buzzing about Hulme's paper.
Many of the managers that he's corresponded with feel that the picture Hulme paints is a bit simplistic.
many share the sense that the era of botanic gardens as intentional introducers of plants to new areas is long past and that, these days,
home gardeners and the horticultural trade are more likely sources of new invasive species . I am not saying that that lets botanic gardens off the hook,
says Blackmore. He agrees that the issue is an important one to highlight. But he also says that many gardens take steps to limit the danger of unwanted escapees.
At his garden, he says, new specimens from abroad are held in quarantine houses until they've been checked for diseases
or fungus that might pose a threat. And its shop doesn't sell anything that is considered invasive.
BGCI is beginning a project with the Council of europe to develop guidelines about the management of alien and invasive species in European botanic gardens, according to Suzanne Sharrock, director of global programmes at the BGCI.
and folded into the organization's general guidelines for botanic gardens interested in conservation. She expects a draft of the European version of the guidelines to be available by August.
and trees that visitors see at botanic gardens. Hulme says some showy but potentially invasive species
says David Harris, deputy director of science at the Royal Botanic Garden in Edinburgh, UK."
Weigel s team went to herbaria in Kew Gardens, outside of London, and at Germany s Botanische Staatssammlung in Munich and sequenced DNA preserved from the dried leaves of infected plants dating between 1845 and 1896.
Amazon plant discovery could yield green cash cropin a farmer s garden deep in the Peruvian Amazon in August 2012, Rainer Bussmann and Carlos Vega struck oil.
Bussmann, an ethnobotanist at the Missouri Botanical garden in St louis and Vega, head of the Institute for Sustainable Local Development and Andean Amazon Cultural and Biological Conservation (INBIAPERU) in Trujillo, Peru, had stumbled on a species unknown to science.
he transplanted it to his garden. By the time Bussmann and Vega met Rodriguez he and his family had developed a taste for the roasted seeds
But Ina Vandebroek, an ethnobotanist at the New york Botanical garden, says that it is typical of the field."
based in Bonn, Germany, in partnership with the Millennium Seed Bank at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew,
In 2009, for instance, she found transgenic sugar-beet seedlings in a bag of soil sold to gardeners."
because the lawn-and-garden company developing it did not use Agrobacterium or any other plant-pest DNA to engineer the grass.
100 botanical gardens to'chaperone'plant relocations.""Our proposal makes this type of approach more responsible,
an ecologist at the Missouri Botanical garden in St louis. Smith presented a preliminary version of the plan this week at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America in Minneapolis, Minnesota,
and is working on a more detailed proposal with colleagues at Botanical gardens Conservation International, headquartered in Richmond, UK.
The researchers recommend that endangered species collected in the wild should be relocated to botanical gardens in stages,
moving between gardens following a dispersal path that would be considered an evolutionarily realistic response to climate change.
Botanical gardens already move species around, although not in a coordinated fashion that takes climate change into consideration.
Managers at the gardens have the horticultural expertise to provide ongoing screening for invasiveness, Smith says.
And moving species from garden to garden could prove simpler than shifting them from one wild place to another,
"It s intriguing to think that botanical gardens offer the infrastructure, already in place, to pull that off."
Smith has begun to map the distribution of botanical gardens to determine the capacity for chaperoned assisted migration in different parts of the world.
The world s botanical gardens are concentrated in eastern North america and eastern and Central europe, with sparse or nonexistent coverage in some notable biodiversity hotspots, such as the Andes mountains
Smith has attempted also to understand how botanical gardens around the world will shift into different climate zones as the planet warms,
His calculations, based on the worst-case scenario for warming produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, show that the climate regime for the Chicago Botanic Garden in Illinois in 2075 will resemble today s conditions at the Missouri Botanical garden.
They aim to release a more detailed proposal in October at the 5th Global Botanic Gardens Congress in Dunedin, New zealand,
Don't know how available it may be in your area (especially for the home gardeners) but it comes in dried compressed blocks about 1'x8x8 that have to be soaked in water-hot to start-for about 24 hours before it can be incorporated in to the growth medium.
--but these pityingly limited rulers once built the great Pyramids of Giza the Temple of Artemis the Colossus of Rhodes the Acropolis the fabled Hanging Gardens of Babylon the Gate of Ishtar and in more modern times:
#How To Turn Garden Beets Into A Drum Machine People conduct electric charges and so do vegetables.
Living in a walled garden beats the hell out of being trapped in a mausoleum.**sheesh!
The pickled cucumbers bell peppers and okra are from our garden laid down in rows beside the solar tarps.
and walk in the Gardens of Eden. I can't even tell how long I've been offnet!
They flower every year at Tresco Abbey Gardens in England on the isles of Scilly. www. tresco. co. uk/what-to-do/abbey-garden/plant april. aspx We've had them here
What's the difference nutritionally between a Mcdonald's salad an Olive Garden salad a bagged salad from the produce section of the grocery store
and one grown in your own garden? Nothing. They're exactly the same nutritionally: lots of fiber vitamins and minerals.
Through more tests at the Morton Arboretum near Chicago the researchers were able to determine that knots in trunks were structural weak points in trees
Those artists'renditions of futuristic skyscrapers with trees growing in rooftop gardens or mid-building parks.
To compensate for a dearth of space in the units themselves the architects plan to create communal areas including a roof garden;
I have a garden area I share with the main house and my slave quarter building has WINDOWS multiple WINDOWS.
the Telegarden or Telerobotic Garden which also combined the'net and agriculture. Established in 1995 (and in operation until 2004
or so) by a team of artists and engineers the Telegarden let user-community members manipulate a robotic arm set over a tabletop garden.
and care in the garden without knowing that it really existed? Why did they think it existed
Sometimes it s the work of external forces as with the atomic testing that gave rise to Godzilla in the original 1954 film and the glowing ooze that turned garden-variety turtles into man-size martial artists.
and is just getting more complex says Marris author of the book Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World.
I am collecting all cases of bud-variations in contradistinction to seed-variations (do you like this term for what some gardeners call'sports'?;
#Genetic discovery points to bigger yields in tomato, other flowering food plantsevery gardener knows the look of a ripe tomato.
But commercial tomato plants have a very different look from the backyard garden variety which can grow endlessly under the right conditions to become tall and lanky.
Hire an 18th century hermitfor those who are wondering what to buy the person who has everything this Christmas a University of Leicester academic has suggested one of history's most bizarre garden accessories:
The author of The Hermit in the Garden: From Imperial Rome to Garden Gnome Professor Campbell has investigated the little-known history of the ornamental hermit a tradition with its roots in Ancient Rome but still present in the form of the humble garden gnome.
In the 18th century it was highly fashionable for owners of country estates to commission architectural follies for their landscape gardens many
The idea of keeping an ornamental hermit in one's garden is an eighteenth-century phenomenon but
And of course one could continue the tradition at a much cheaper cost with the purchase of a simple garden gnome.
The Hermit in the Garden: From Imperial Rome to Garden Gnome by Professor Gordon Campbell is published by OUP.
Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by University of Leicester. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length t
Heaths woods and meadows are in most ways no more'natural'than suburban gardens or inner-city waste grounds.
or whether consumers are willing to limit their intake to local seasonally available goods. It did not include citizen-based production from allotments urban gardens etc.
#Coral reef gardens found thriving in Gulf of Mainenew research has found a type of coral reef called Octocorals previously thought to have diminished off the east coast of the US in the Gulf of Maine has been discovered recently surviving in dense coral garden communities in more than one location.
The paper'Octocoral gardens in the Gulf of Maine (NW Atlantic) by Peter Auster et al published in Biodiversity studied Octocorals a type of fragile deep-sea coral reef that grow
A recent expedition in July this year to the western Jordan Basin and Schoodic Ridge regions of the Gulf of Maine revealed an initial report of impressive octoral gardens.
The coral gardens were defined as areas where octocorals were among the dominant fauna and occurred at densities higher than surrounding patches.
1 colony m used in ICES to define coral garden habitat. Some Paramuricea placomus colonies were over one metre in height from the base showing both yellow
Together with colleagues from The New york Botanical garden they sequenced characteristic parts of the DNA of these conifers
At the Botanical garden's Pfizer Plant Research Laboratory they worked with Garden scientist Dr. Damon Little to generate DNA barcodes for all of the individuals
In addition they created a living Podocarpaceae collection in the Botanic Garden of the Ruhr-Universitã¤t
which promotes the protection of rare and endangered species. The Bochum team propagate the species and pass them on to other botanic gardens worldwide.
while holding on to the branch of a tree within the Lumbini Garden midway between the kingdoms of her husband and parents.
#Tasmania home to first alpine sword-sedgeresearchers from the University of New england (Australia) and the Royal Botanic Gardens and Domain Trust Sydney (Australia) have discovered a high-altitude species of sedge
Karen Wilson (Royal Botanic Gardens and Domain Trust Sydney) described this new species in the open access journal Phytokeys.
and can be found mainly in pine at night hidden away in pine forests crawling on rocks or sitting on stone garden walls.
Instead they host scale insects familiar to gardeners as common backyard pests which produce the honeydew.
and other common garden birds balance the competing risks of predation and starvation'said Damien Farine.'
'Winter is a tough time for small garden birds as not only is there less natural food available
Most gardeners are familiar with that. The researchers used DNA sequencing to characterize the microbial community living in each soil sample.
Carbon on balancethis efficient decomposition is why home gardeners love earthworms: they break down organic matter releasing nutrients.
According to the annual survey of the National Gardening Association households that identify as do-it-yourself lawn and gardeners spent $29. 1 billion in related retail sales in 2012.
By reallocating some of those purchases to monarch-friendly plants people would be able to contribute to the conservation of the species as well as maintain a flower garden said Oberhauser.
Unfortunately many plants purchased by gardeners have been treated with systemic insecticides that can kill both pollinators that consume the nectar
and master gardeners would like to use more native plants but that a broad palette of native plants is not currently available from most growers.
or having been transplanted into their gardens. There is no direct evidence yet of over-extraction but sustainability studies are needed at population level to insure the protection of this beautiful species. Dracaena kaweesakii is thought to be endangered through having a limited distribution destruction of limestone for concrete and extraction of trees for gardens comments Dr Wilkin
about the conservation status of the new dragon tree species. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by Pensoft Publishers.
#Flower research shows gardens can be a feast for the eyes #and the beesare our favourite garden flowers attractive to hungry visitors such as bees and butterflies to feed on?
Researchers at the Laboratory of Apiculture and Social Insects (LASI) at the University of Sussex have completed one of the first scientific studies to put the business of recommending pollinator-friendly garden flowers on a firmer scientific footing.
Gardens are more important than ever as a source of food for a wide variety of insects who feed on the nectar
As popular support for wildlife continues to grow gardeners are increasingly looking for ways to help bees
and other insects by providing attractive flowers in their gardens for insects to feed on. To do this they often rely on#oepollinator-friendly#plant lists.
The study funded by the Body shop Foundation involved repeatedly counting flower-visiting insects over two summers as they foraged on 32 popular summer-flowering garden plant varieties in a specially planted experimental garden on the University s
campus (each variety in 2 1x1m beds) with two smaller additional gardens set up in year two to check the generality of the results.
All the plants studied had to be popular garden plants be widely and easily available for purchase
and his Phd student Mihail Gaburzov was that garden flowers attractive to the human eye vary enormously (approx 100-fold) in their attractiveness to insects meaning that the best plants for bees
So it pays to make an informed choice of plants from the thousands available to gardeners.
#oeour trial is by no means exhaustive#we looked at a small selection of the thousands of plants you can find in a typical garden centre.
#oehelping bees in your garden is a no-brainer. Flowers that attract bees are just as easy to grow
Anyone can do this in their own garden or park or even when shopping for plants in a garden centre.#
#1#Quantifying variation among garden plants in attractiveness to bees and other flower-visiting insects Functional Ecology (October 2013.
The Asian Giant hornets are armored dangerous heavily predators says Ken Tan the first author of the paper who also works at the Chinese Academy of Science's Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden.
and closer to home--to locally grown produce from neighboring farms or even from their own restaurant-owned gardens.
As the concept of local food and urban gardening gains popularity urban agriculture with its benefits and obstacles is coming to many cities.
Urban gardens are built often on previously unused lots increasing the beauty and value of the neighborhood.
They provide recreation opportunities and a social network for the gardeners involved. Urban food production also means that healthy fresh produce is readily available to city dwellers.
In light of the benefits urban gardens are popping up across the nation. But the challenges that organizers and growers face must be understood
and addressed if urban gardens are to become widespread and even profitable. Several obstacles face planners and growers including soil contaminants water availability and changes in climate and atmospheric conditions.
It may then be possible to develop new crops that are adapted to urban gardens and customized for the area.
Urban gardens then provide a natural laboratory for studying how these climatic and atmospheric changes will affect plants and crop yields in the future.
Leafcutter ants for example carry bacteria that help prevent other fungi from contaminating their fungal gardens.
But David Dilcher of Indiana University Bloomington and Mikhail S. Romanov of the N. V. Tsitsin Main Botanical garden in Moscow show that it is closely related to fossil plant specimens from the Lower Cretaceous period.
and grass in a garden compost pile uncertainties exist about the nature and fate of the degradation products released during the breakdown.
or snow thistle that home gardeners visualize at the mention of weed. Rather the battle involves nightmares like Palmer amaranth pigweed
and Missouri Botanical gardens Dr Chris Stapleton turned his attention to the bamboos of Africa. He found that the features of the mountain bamboos were significantly different to those of Asia
manure zeolite lime or biofertiliser as well as coal waste alone and regular garden soil. Plants grown in the coal waste with added biofertiliser achieved nearly twice the weight
and yield of those grown in garden soil or in coal waste with added manure and more than twice the weight and yield of those grown in coal waste with added zeolite.
Hong Liu of Florida International University and the Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden; Thomas R. Rainwater of the U s. Fish and Wildlife Service;
Staff at the UCSB biology greenhouse had the foresight to contact the U s. Botanic Garden in Washington D c. to secure pollen from its plant (nicknamed Mortimer in social media that bloomed July 21.
and are marketed now for use in people s gardens. The trade is large and widespread:
Although renowned for their ability to chew through a gardener's prize petunias or strawberry patch still relatively little is known about the effect these munching molluscs have on large scale grassland conservation projects.
while at Newcastle University and is based now at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew. We know a lot about the benefits
We have to cope with native slugs in our gardens and crops but this research shows they can be equally damaging in natural systems.
which we see in many gardens in Denmark. It's ready to spread throughout the Danish countryside.
which we have helped along by planting in our gardens. Here it was found in The english countryside.
The despised weed makes herbicide to kill neighboring plantscontrary to popular belief crabgrass does not thrive in lawns gardens and farm fields by simply crowding out other plants.
Chui-Hua Kong and colleagues point out that crabgrass is not only a headache for lawns and home gardens but also a major cause of crop loss on farms.
It is estimated that around half of UK householders feed birds in their gardens. This equates to around 50-60 thousand tonnes of bird food provisioned each year
Only 1%of women used insect repellents during pregnancy. 10%of pregnant women used outdoor insecticides such as in gardens or vegetable plots and yards with plants:
The less educated the more pesticidesmultiparous women born in Spain with a lower level of education who have a garden
#Bioenergy potential unearthed in leaf-cutter ant communitiesas spring warms up Wisconsin humans aren't the only ones tending their gardens.
While these fungus gardens are a source of food and shelter for the ants for researchers they are potential models for better biofuel production.
We are interested in the whole fungus garden community because a lot of plant biomass goes in and is converted to energy for the ants says Frank Aylward a bacteriology graduate student and researcher with the Great lakes Bioenergy Research center.
Building on Aylward's previous study of these gardens the researchers relied on genome sequencing provided by the U s. Department of energy Joint Genome Institute (JGI)
In addition to sequencing the genome of Leucoagaricus gongylophorous the fungus cultivated by leaf-cutting ants the researchers looked at the genomes of entire living garden communities.
in fact the gardens are also home to a diversity of bacteria that may help boost the fungus's productivity.
which also act as gardeners in fungal communities. They hope that a better understanding of these complex systems will help them share their biomass-degrading secrets with bioenergy researchers.
Dealing with invasive plantsthere's nothing more frustrating for gardeners than discovering that their well-planned plots
and gardens less susceptible to invasion she says. Clearing everything from a weedy spot in the yard can be cathartic
but in the long run homeowners are rewarded with lovely gardens and healthy lawns. Story Source: The above story is provided based on materials by Saint joseph's University.
and North america and had been preserved in the herbaria of the Botanical State Collection Munich and the Kew Gardens in London.
and Shaohua Li the director of the Wuhan Botanical garden at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
#Community gardens may produce more than vegetablespeople who participate in community gardening have a significantly lower body mass index--as well as lower odds of being overweight
or obese--than do their non-gardening neighbors. Researchers at the University of Utah reported these
It has been shown previously that community gardens can provide a variety of social and nutritional benefits to neighborhoods says Cathleen Zick lead author of the study
But until now we did not have data to show a measurable health benefit for those who use the gardens.
Results showed that women community gardeners had an average BMI 1. 84 lower than their neighbors
For men the BMI was lower by 2. 36 for gardeners--a difference of 16 pounds for a man 5 feet 10 inches tall--compared to the neighborhood cohort.
Gardeners were also less likely to be overweight or obese; 46 percent less for women gardeners and 62 percent less for men gardeners.
Researchers also looked at the BMIS of individuals related to the gardeners namely siblings and spouses.
When compared to same sex siblings a similar advantage to unrelated neighbors was found. Women in the community gardening group had a BMI 1. 88 lower than their sisters;
for men the difference was 1. 33 lower for the gardeners compared to their brothers.
Both differences were statistically significant. For spouses of married gardeners there was no difference in BMI
or odds of being overweight or obese. That finding was not surprising as researchers had expected that spouses would benefit from eating food produced in the garden and perhaps from helping out with the gardening activities.
These data are intriguing although they were drawn from participants in a single community gardening organization in Salt lake city
However as the percentage of Americans living in urban areas continues to grow this initial study validates the idea that community gardens are a valuable neighborhood asset that can promote healthier living.
How the study was conductedthe study used unique administrative data to examine--for the first time--the relationship between community gardening and a health outcome.
Researchers compared community gardeners'BMIS and odds of being overweight or obese with three control groups.
The third group was married spouses of the gardeners because they would likely share lifestyle and food choices including food grown in the community garden.
Gardeners were drawn from a pool of individuals active with Wasatch Community Gardens (WCG) a 20-year old nonprofit organization located in Salt lake city. WCG provides a network of urban gardens located throughout the local area
as well as classes programs and events focused on gardening and eating locally. After gaining assurance from the gardeners that they had no concerns regarding WCG's involvement with the study WCG staff provided names
and addresses of 423 adults who had gardened on one of the community plots for at least one year between 1995 and 2010.
A total of 375 gardeners were linked to BMI information in the database; once linked driver's license records were used to build a sample of neighbors--individuals matched for age gender
In the end data on 198 gardeners and 67 spouses were included in the analyses and height and weight information came from driver's license records after they began community gardening.
We know obesity is costly Zick concludes. This study begins to shed light on the costs and benefits of the choices families make about eating and physical activity.
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