"You can also mist your plants as needed, in between watering but misting should not be used as a sole source of moisture. We prefer to use a dunking method when we water, and then every other week or so we will give the plants a longer soak for an hour or 2. Always take care to gently shake any excess water off the base of the plants, as sitting water can cause rot and damage/kill the plant. It is recommended that you water your plants in the morning, and leave them out of their containers in an area that they can dry within 4 hours. Never let your Air Plant sit in water for prolonged periods of time!"
This allowed people to terraform their environments to a degree never before achieved. It wasn't just that people in cities could admire a pretty foreign plant in their parlor. The British could ship tea plants across continents from a hostile nation and transplant them to a country where they could be mass-grown. Fruit trees could be transported across climates that would kill them into foreign places where they would thrive. A Peruvian tree was known to produce quinine — a defense against malaria. Malaria was, and is still, a terrifying killer. It could be stemmed only with the medication found in Peru. Once it was put in a case and shipped out, malaria could by prevented everywhere. Plants that could provide medicine, nourishment, or just enormous profit, could be taken wherever they were needed (or could be grown en masse) regardless of where they originated.
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| Grow Gun by Duncan Shirah |
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| Designed by Soo-Yeon Yang, via Yanko Design |
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| Photo courtesy of Feedback Farms, via Wired |
"We're monitoring moisture and light at various stages for a test to evaluate five different planter designs," Hallaran says. "We've got 40 beds on half the lot. Each bed is planted with the same varieties of kale and tomatoes, but in randomized positions, The types of beds are also randomized. We're evaluating yield and crop quality."
Hallaran, who studied software design at Reed College before dropping out and spent summers during high school and college working on New England farms, designed a virtual dashboard that displays key information about how the plants are progressing. "If you're trying to coordinate production on two lots that are in this case, in Brooklyn, about a half mile apart, how do you prioritize which one to check out if you have limited labor?"
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| Japanese garden at Lotusland |
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| Cactus garden at Lotusland |
http://www.lotusland.org/
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| Fern garden at Lotusland |
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| Topiary garden at Lotusland |
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| The theatre garden contains an audience of stone grotesques |
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| Painted tiles by the house |
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| Massive tree at the edge of the lawn |
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| Madame Ganna Walska |
"She married six times, wrote her autobiography, Always Room at the Top, and continued to study both vocal music and spiritual teachings in search of creative fulfillment and personal enlightenment. After residing in Paris and New York, Madame Walska turned her sights toward California’s sunny climate and free-thinking residents."
"She wanted the best, the biggest, and the most unusual plants available and was often willing to pay any price to get them. So determined was she to finish the work she had begun that in the 1970s she auctioned off some of her jewelry in order to finance her final creation—the cycad garden."
