Two Cool Plants

During the winter gardening months I try and fill our greenhouse with a few unusual varieties of plants that help keep us a unique destination for flower enthusiasts and since it is almost time to switch back to our spring plants like geraniums, impatiens, begonias and other flowering annuals I thought today would be a great day to point out two interesting and fun varieties of plants we have in stock now before they disappear.
 
The first is a carnivorous plant that gets asked for a lot, mostly by kids. It's the Venus Flytrap!
 
Venus Flytrap, (Dionaea muscipula): is a carnivorous plant that catches and digests animal prey—mostly insects and arachnids. Its trapping structure is formed by the terminal portion of each of the plant's leaves and is triggered by tiny hairs on their inner surfaces. When an insect or spider crawling along the leaves contacts a hair, the trap closes if a different hair is contacted within twenty seconds of the first strike.       

The Venus Flytrap is found in environments, such as bogs and wet savannahs. Small in stature and slow growing, the Venus flytrap tolerates fire well, and depends on periodic burning to suppress its competition,  It survives in wet sandy and peaty soils. Although it has been successfully transplanted and grown in many locales around the world, it is found natively only in North and South Carolina in the United States, specifically within a 60-mile radius of Wilmington, North Carolina.  There also appears to be a naturalized population of Venus Flytraps in northern Florida as well as populations in the New Jersey Pine Barrens.  The Venus Flytrap is not a tropical plant and can tolerate mild winters. In fact, Venus Flytraps that do not go through a period of winter dormancy will weaken and die after a period of time. (Source: Wikipedia)

Venus Fly Traps in our Greenhouse

Got one!

                                     
Another favorite of mine is a Staghorn Fern. We have some in our greenhouse now, small but very healthy and vigorous growers.

Staghorn or also called Elkhorn Fern (Platycerium): is a genus of about 18 fern species in the poly pod family, Polypodiaceae. Ferns in this genus are widely known for their uniquely-shaped fronds. This genus is epithetic and is native to tropical and temperate areas of South America, Africa, Southeast Asia, Australia and New Guinea.

A few years back I had one that was over 5 feet across (like the big one below).  A specimen that made it into the Boston Flower Show where someone offered us $500.00 for it and someone (I won't say) sold it when I wasn't there.  Ugh I still have nightmares about that!  I have not seen one so large in our area since.

Staghorn's in our Greenhouse

Growing in the Wild

Like the one that got away

Well those are just two of the many varieties of plants that you can find at Pemberton Farms.  Below are some pictures of our greenhouse featuring the regular players too, tropical foliage, flowering plants, hanging baskets and more.  Stop in sometime and say hi.

 Here are a few pics of our greenhouse this month.  Grab lunch in our gourmet food store and sit, eat and drink among the plants. 

Have lunch in our Greenhouse.  We make yummy sandwiches!

A small selection of herbs for your indoor garden

Grab and Go planters

Warmest winter ever? Maybe.

I have been in the gardening business for over 20 years and I can not remember a winter as warm, and with as little snow as we are having this winter, or should I say this NOT winter.

According to my friends in the weather office at WBZ Boston; we are on pace to have the lowest snow fall EVER for the month of February, are on our 5th consecutive month of above normal temperatures, and if it doesn't snow again, the least amount of snow fall ever for the year.

Quite a difference from winter in New England last year!

Remember February 2010!!

That would be my wife in our Driveway, She's 5, 7"

Thank goodness I didn't need anything in the Shed

So what does this "Snowless Winter" mean to us gardeners in New England?  Will our flower beds, trees and shrubs, roses, fruits be okay?  I spoke with one of New England's largest nursery suppliers today and he said that although most plants will be fine there are some varieties of woody plants that may not bloom as much as they would have if we had had more days below freezing.  He also said some varieties of fruit trees may not produce as much as in year past as they need an extended period of below freezing temperature to produce, although this we won't know until the summer months.

Another effect of the warmth is that many ground animals like squirrels, mice, chipmunks and voles have been more active this winter and as such are out more in search for food.  This means they could be going after your flower bulbs, especially since the ground is not completely frozen, at least around the Greater Boston area.

Today it reached 57 degrees and I was out in my back yard and snapped this photo of some new growth emerging from my Clematis Paniculata.  Really, starting to grow out in February?  Just crazy.

New Growth in February?  Clematis Paniculata

Well, with only one more week of February left what can really happen at this point?  Yes, we can still get snow but once March hits it usually doesn't stick around.  So my finger are crossed that the weather remains calm.  I can't believe I've used my snow blower only once this year.   We've had  a whopping 7.6 inches of total snow fall this winter I've been able to manage it with just a shovel and a broom.

Spring is ahead.  Pemberton Garden Center is beginning to fill up with all it's gardening supplies.  A customer asked me today, "When are the Pansies coming".. Funny...

It will be here soon and I look forward to the time my customers come back into the garden center with their tales of how their garden faired over the winter.  Some years it's a lot of sad stories, some years great successes of survival.  Although I am not sure what I'll hear in about 6 weeks it won't surprise me if someone said their impatiens survived a this New England winter that wasn't.

Oldest Living Plant...

30,000-Year-Old Flower Brought Back to Life by Russian Scientists

By Melissa Knowles 

 Click here to watch it on Yahoo




An Ice Age flower has come back to life. How exactly did that happen? Well, a team of Russian scientists discovered a burrow that contained fruit and seeds left in the Siberian permafrost by a squirrel that buried them about 30,000 years ago. Remnants of the Silene stenophylla blossom were found perfectly preserved, and in an experiment to extract the seeds, the scientists pioneered a new way to resurrect the plant. For thousands of years, the flower was fully encased in ice, and no water was able to get to it. The storage chambers that the squirrels created were filled with hay and animal fur to protect their treasure. Stanislav Gubin, one scientist working with the discovery, called it a "natural cryobank." The blossom with its white flowers looks similar to its modern-day version, which also grows in the same region as its predecessor. The burrows, which were found 125 feet below the surface, also contained bones of wooly mammoths, deer, and bison. So in addition to bringing the flower back to life, scientists hope to find preserved animal tissue that may one day lead to another breakthrough--wooly mammoths roaming the earth again. People on social media are saying these discoveries are eerily similar to the "Jurassic Park" movie franchise in which a mosquito trapped in amber led to the resurrection of dinosaurs. One person tweeted, "awesome."
Does it just grind your gears when someone one-ups you? That may be how the Russian scientists mentioned in the previous article may be feeling. American and Chinese scientists have made a remarkable discovery, too. They have found a nearly 300 million-year-old forest. It was found buried under a coal mine in Wuda, China, and it had been perfectly maintained under a thick layer of volcanic ash. University of Pennsylvania paleobotanist Hermann Pfefferkorn compares the discovery to the lost Roman city of Pompeii. Pompeii was completely covered in volcanic ash for more than 1,700 years from an eruption at Mount Vesuvius until it was accidentally discovered. This newly found Permian forest dates to when the first mammals, turtles, and some dinosaurs inhabited the earth. Scientists are comparing the find to a time capsule that preserved entire trees and plants exactly as they were at the time of the volcanic eruption. This has allowed scientists to digitally re-create what the 10,000-square-foot forest would have looked like. The scientists have been able to identify six different groups of trees, including some as tall as 80 feet and even a few that are now extinct.