Oregon Cities

Oregon State Featured Florists

Oregon Flowers News

Apr 4, 2021

2021’s Most Coveted Flowers? Pale Dahlias for the Garden - The Wall Street Journal

BAREFOOT Swan Island Dahlias, an Oregon business nearly a century old, hybridized this pearly, peachy specimen with a 4-inch wingspan of quilled “semi-cactus” petals. In development for five years before coming to market in 2021, the dark-stemmed plant reportedly blooms prolifically. Preorder August 1 for 2022, $30, dahlias.com MARIONBERRY MILKSHAKE This 5-foot-tall choice produces dahlias in what’s known as the formal decorative style: tightly wound, in a good way. Named for the lavender hue of a milkshake made with the Oregon-bred marionberry—a type of blackberry born in 1956—it offers all the creamy satisfaction of a diner malt with none of the calories. $30, dahlias.com OKAPIS SUNSET This semi-cactus petaled dahlia produces blends of apricot, yellow, white and pink that vary slightly—even on the same plant. Though purists dismiss this lovely inconsistency as unreliability, it explains much of the celebrity of the similarly variable Café au Lait. $12, whiteflowerfarm.com ...

Apr 4, 2021

Ask an expert: Brown tips on this healthy cypress tree are male pollen-bearing flowers - OregonLive

It’s finally spring and we’re ready to garden. If you’ve got questions, turn to Ask an Expert, an online question-and-answer tool from Oregon State University’s Extension Service. OSU Extension faculty and Master Gardeners reply to queries within two business days, usually less. To ask a question, simply go to the OSU Extension website and type in a question and the county where you live. Here are some asked by other gardeners. What’s yours?Q: We planted a small cypress tree 11/2 years ago. It seemed to be doing fine all last year, but this spring it has developed brown tips on many of the sprays. What is wrong with the tree and what can I do about it?A: The brown structures on the tips of your cypress are the male flowers (pollen bearing, also called “cones”) that appear in spring. There does not appear to be anything wrong with the tree. Hinoki cypress is in the genus C...

Apr 4, 2021

Celebrate Easter with a gift of life - West Hawaii Today

Century when World War I soldier Louis Houghton brought what was then called the Bermuda Lily to Oregon. Commercial flower growers began to grow and promote them for the holiday. ADVERTISING Some Bible references to support using the lily are found in the Sermon on the Mount. “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow. They toil not, neither do they spin and yet Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” It is also said that lilies were discovered blooming in abundance in the garden of Gethsemane after Christ died on the cross, signifying the resurrection of Jesus and hope of eternal life. So instead of throwing that fading plant away this year, why not attempt to make it bloom for next Easter, and each year thereafter. You can place the plant in a sunny, garden location or even keep it in the pot until fall. Easter lily, Lilium longiflorum, bulbs consist of scales growing from a core. When exposed to the air too long, scales lose their moisture and shrivel. Once they become dehydrated, the bulb is gone. You can store them for a short period if you keep them cool and put them in a moist medium such as sponge rock or peat. However, it is better to replant the bulbs right after digging them up, cleaning them, and looking for signs of disease such as basal rot. Recondition the soil where the bulbs are to go. It should be rich in humus, which contains the helpful microorganisms. A well balanced slow release plant food should be added and mixed with the soil. The depth at which you should plant a bulb depends upon its size. The rule of thumb is two times the diameter of the bulb. This means, if you have a jumbo bulb that measures 2 inches in diameter, there would be a space of 4 inches between the top of the bulb an...

Jun 19, 2020

- Gardening: Painful memories of a rose garden - Chestnut Hill Local

A rose is photogenic: sculptural, colorful, beautiful. We couldn’t decide so we ordered over two dozen varieties of bare root roses from Oregon growers. I learned that there are many categories of the genus Rosa, in the family rosacea, but four basic kinds: tea roses, floribunda, climbers and shrubs. Tea roses (I still don’t know why they’re so-called) have long stems and large flowers that do well in a vase for few days after they’re cut. They’re the kind you buy for Valentine’s day. Floribundas produce clusters of flowers with shorter stems. Climbers are amazingly vigorous and will grow canes at the rate of 10 feet or more a year. Shrub roses are more compact and tend to produce an abundance of flowers. Hybrid tea roses are varieties developed by horticulturalists to obtain new colors and to maximize vigor and disease resistance. They are gorgeous and come in every color except blue. A subset of hybrid teas is called grandiflora, with tea-like flowers and the hardiness (supposedly) of floribundas. We live in a climate that is challenging for roses, especially the teas. Hot, humid summers encourage a fungus called “black spot” that eats the leaves, turning them yellow, speckling them, slowly killing the plant. During the 20 years we lived in Germantown, the disease killed many. The other great threat was Japanese Beetles. Do not try to grow yellow roses because the little devils are strongly attracted to the petals. From the yellows, they will spread to the others, albeit less voraciously. They burrow into dirt and lay their eggs, creating new generations. They are damned hard to get rid of once they find your roses. I was traveling a lot during the years we lived in Germantown and wasn’t inclined to undertake the recommended anti-fungal spraying regimen. It was a chore I was too lazy to undertake – thirty rose bushes and their hundreds of leafy canes. Spraying just the ones with an obvious infection will not do – yo...

Mar 19, 2020

How the monkeyflower gets its spots - UC Berkeley

California and Oregon, including at the UC Davis McLaughlin Reserve. In parallel, UConn postdoctoral researcher Baoqing Ding worked with a very similar plant with fully red-throated flowers found when surveying a population of Lewis’s monkeyflower that had induced DNA mutations. [embedded content] When the scientists presented bees in the lab with the two types of monkeyflowers, they preferred the red tongue variety to the spotted variety, though the red tongue variety is less common in nature. (UC Berkeley video by Erin Patterson and Anna Greenlee) In a previous study, the Yuan lab had found that a gene called NEGAN (nectar guide anthocyanin) acts as an activator in the monkeyflower petals, signaling the cells to produce the red pigment. Through detailed genomic analysis in both monkeyflower species, the two groups were able to pinpoint that a gene called RTO, short for red tongue, acts as the inhibitor. The red-throated forms of the monkeyflower have defective RTO inhibitor genes, resulting in a characteristic all-red throat, rather than red spots. To confirm their findings, Holalu used the CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing system to knock out the RTO gene in spotted variants of the flower. The result was flowers with a flashy red throat. Further experiments revealed how the functional form of the RTO protein moves to neighboring cells and represses NEGAN to prevent the spread of pigmentation beyond the local spots. This study is the first reported use of CRISPR-Cas9 editing to research the biology of monkeyflowers. The team also collaborated with Michael Blinov at the UConn School of Medicine to develop a mathematical model to explain how different self-organized patterns might arise from this genetic system. “This work is the simplest demonstration of the reaction-diffusion theory of how patterns arise in biological systems,” said Yaowu Yuan, associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UConn. “We are closer to understanding how these patterns arise throughout nature.” img aria-describedby="caption-attachment-77231" class="size-full wp-image-77231" src="https://news.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/IMG_6289_BN.jpg"...