Monday, June 10, 2013

Monday Musings: Succulents, stolen roses and daisy fields

 fresh cuttings I'm trying to root...


This is not gonna turn into a gardening blog, but the thing is I love flowers! And plants in general.

Lately I started having a little more plants at home, as well as reading and learning about taking care of them.

In Romania the tradition is that everyone's mum has a lot of house plants. It's just one of those things that mums do, you don't even think about it that much.

I guess it just dawned on me when a friend came by and she was like oh, you have a green thumb!



I wouldn't really put it that way, but I guess it's mostly due to our particularly sunny apartment (such a rare thing around here).

So I started reading more, found out that the crazy plant we've had for ages is actually a succulent!

Now succulents are a BIG trend right now and i'm pretty surprised i didn't notice it earlier. part of the attraction is also the fact that now a lot of hardware stores started carrying the craziest variations for really cheap! The other factor must be the gorgeous creative displays.

My friends from Romania were telling me how the trend is evolving there as well. What I don't know if anyone noticed is that those exotic succulents are pretty much the same plants used in those horrid communist garden arrangements that spelled city names!

Some species of succulents have been around for quite a while, although not under this classification, such as portulaca, which is one of my mum's favorite flowers.



Probably the most amazing thing about succulents is when they bloom - especially this little guy who first looked like it was covered in spiderwebs (probably a Sempervivum arachnoideum) that has now bloomed with the most fascinating alien flowers.

The other cool thing about succulents is that they're super easy to propagate by cutting, which in turn made me obsessed with pinching little samples of new species from public gardens. I don't if these two have any chances of growing, but they just look so cool!



I love it when the place is full of flowers and this time between mid May and early June is just perfect for finding free stuff like wild flowers and stealing an occasional municipal garden rose (Leslie Knope would most definitely put my picture on a John Ford-like WANTED poster for that!).


 

 
 


Maybe this bad habit has been nurtured by growing up in a small town in Transylvania, being close to nature and picking huge daisy bouquets from the fields. I love it when the grass grows super tall and full of flowers, just before the cutting. I mean, all those flowers will turn into hay, so why not take a few home?

And last but not least,some lovely gardening reads I stumbled upon : Lovely Greens and You Grow Girl.  You probably know both these ladies and their amazing gardening skills but if you don't you're in for a treat.

Been finding a lot of things for the boutique lately, I'm preparing another update this Saturday. It's so much nicer to be working in a home filled with flowers!

Do you guys have a succulent collection? What kind of flowers do you like?


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