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Albuca Humilis
''Albuca humilis'' is a bulbous flowering plant, placed in the genus '' Albuca'' in the subfamily Scilloideae of the family Asparagaceae. It is native to southern Africa – to South Africa from the Free State to KwaZulu-Natal according to some sources, or to the Drakensberg Mountains of Lesotho according to others. ''Albuca humilis'' was first described by John Gilbert Baker in 1895. The specific epithet ''humilis'' means "low-growing". It grows from small white bulb In botany, a bulb is structurally a short stem with fleshy leaves or leaf basesBell, A.D. 1997. ''Plant form: an illustrated guide to flowering plant morphology''. Oxford University Press, Oxford, U.K. that function as food storage organs duri ...s, each producing only one or two narrow leaves in the summer, dying down in the winter. The flower stem is up to tall, with one to three upward-facing flowers with six tepals up to long. All the tepals are white with a green stripe on the outside; the inner ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Gilbert Baker
John Gilbert Baker (13 January 1834 – 16 August 1920) was an English botanist. His son was the botanist Edmund Gilbert Baker (1864–1949). Biography Baker was born in Guisborough in North Yorkshire, the son of John and Mary (née Gilbert) Baker, and died in Kew. He was educated at Quaker schools at Ackworth School and Bootham School, York. He then worked at the library and herbarium of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew between 1866 and 1899, and was keeper of the herbarium from 1890 to 1899. He wrote handbooks on many plant groups, including Amaryllidaceae, Bromeliaceae, Iridaceae, Liliaceae, and ferns. His published works includ''Flora of Mauritius and the Seychelles''(1877) and ''Handbook of the Irideae'' (1892). He married Hannah Unthank in 1860. Their son Edmund was one of twins, and his twin brother died before 1887. John G. Baker was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1878. He was awarded the Veitch Memorial Medal of the Royal Horticultural Society in 1907. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Drakensberg Mountains
The Drakensberg (Afrikaans: Drakensberge, Zulu: uKhahlambha, Sotho: Maluti) is the eastern portion of the Great Escarpment, which encloses the central Southern African plateau. The Great Escarpment reaches its greatest elevation – within the border region of South Africa and Lesotho. The Drakensberg escarpment stretches for more than from the Eastern Cape Province in the South, then successively forms, in order from south to north, the border between Lesotho and the Eastern Cape and the border between Lesotho and KwaZulu-Natal Province. Thereafter it forms the border between KwaZulu-Natal and the Free State, and next as the border between KwaZulu-Natal and Mpumalanga Province. The escarpment winds north from there, through Mpumalanga, where it includes features such as the Blyde River Canyon, Three Rondavels, and God's Window. It then extends farther north to Hoedspruit in southeastern Limpopo where it is known as 'Klein Drakensberg' by the Afrikaner. From Hoedspruit it ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew is a non-departmental public body in the United Kingdom sponsored by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. An internationally important botanical research and education institution, it employs 1,100 staff. Its board of trustees is chaired by Dame Amelia Fawcett. The organisation manages botanic gardens at Kew in Richmond upon Thames in south-west London, and at Wakehurst, a National Trust property in Sussex which is home to the internationally important Millennium Seed Bank, whose scientists work with partner organisations in more than 95 countries. Kew, jointly with the Forestry Commission, founded Bedgebury National Pinetum in Kent in 1923, specialising in growing conifers. In 1994, the Castle Howard Arboretum Trust, which runs the Yorkshire Arboretum, was formed as a partnership between Kew and the Castle Howard Estate. In 2019, the organisation had 2,316,699 public visitors at Kew, and 312,813 at Wakehurst. Its site at Kew ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
World Checklist Of Selected Plant Families
The World Checklist of Selected Plant Families (usually abbreviated to WCSP) is an "international collaborative programme that provides the latest peer reviewed and published opinions on the accepted scientific names and synonyms of selected plant families." Maintained by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, it is available online, allowing searches for the names of families, genera and species, as well as the ability to create checklists. The project traces its history to work done in the 1990s by Kew researcher Rafaël Govaerts on a checklist of the genus ''Quercus''. Influenced by the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation, the project expanded. , 173 families of seed plants were included. Coverage of monocotyledon families is complete; other families are being added. There is a complementary project called the International Plant Names Index (IPNI), in which Kew is also involved. The IPNI aims to provide details of publication and does not aim to determine which are accepted spec ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bulb Frame
In agriculture and gardening, a cold frame is a transparent-roofed enclosure, built low to the ground, used to protect plants from adverse weather, primarily excessive cold or wet. The transparent top admits sunlight and prevents heat escape via convection that would otherwise occur, particularly at night. Essentially, a cold frame functions as a miniature greenhouse to extend the growing season. Historically, cold frames were built to be used in addition to a heated greenhouse. The name itself exemplifies the distinction between the warm greenhouse and the unheated cold frame. They were frequently built as part of the greenhouse's foundation brickwork along the southern wall (in northern latitudes). This allowed seeds to be germinated in the greenhouse and then easily moved to the attached cold frame to be "hardened-off" before final planting outside. Cold frames are similar to some enclosed hotbeds, also called hotboxes. The difference is in the amount of heat generated inside. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alpine House
A greenhouse (also called a glasshouse, or, if with sufficient heating, a hothouse) is a structure with walls and roof made chiefly of transparent material, such as glass, in which plants requiring regulated climatic conditions are grown.These structures range in size from small sheds to industrial-sized buildings. A miniature greenhouse is known as a cold frame. The interior of a greenhouse exposed to sunlight becomes significantly warmer than the external temperature, protecting its contents in cold weather. Many commercial glass greenhouses or hothouses are high tech production facilities for vegetables, flowers or fruits. The glass greenhouses are filled with equipment including screening installations, heating, cooling, and lighting, and may be controlled by a computer to optimize conditions for plant growth. Different techniques are then used to manage growing conditions, including air temperature, relative humidity and vapour-pressure deficit, in order to provide the opti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tepal
A tepal is one of the outer parts of a flower (collectively the perianth). The term is used when these parts cannot easily be classified as either sepals or petals. This may be because the parts of the perianth are undifferentiated (i.e. of very similar appearance), as in ''Magnolia'', or because, although it is possible to distinguish an outer whorl of sepals from an inner whorl of petals, the sepals and petals have similar appearance to one another (as in ''Lilium''). The term was first proposed by Augustin Pyramus de Candolle in 1827 and was constructed by analogy with the terms "petal" and "sepal". (De Candolle used the term ''perigonium'' or ''perigone'' for the tepals collectively; today, this term is used as a synonym for ''perianth''.) p. 39. Origin Undifferentiated tepals are believed to be the ancestral condition in flowering plants. For example, '' Amborella'', which is thought to have separated earliest in the evolution of flowering plants, has flowers with undiffer ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lesotho
Lesotho ( ), officially the Kingdom of Lesotho, is a country landlocked country, landlocked as an Enclave and exclave, enclave in South Africa. It is situated in the Maloti Mountains and contains the Thabana Ntlenyana, highest mountains in Southern Africa. It has an area of over and has a population of about million. It was previously the British Crown colony of Basutoland, which declared independence from the United Kingdom on 4 October 1966. It is a fully sovereign state and is a member of the United Nations, the Commonwealth of Nations, the African Union, and the Southern African Development Community. The name ''Lesotho'' roughly translates to "land of the Sotho". History Basutoland Basutoland emerged as a single body politic, polity under King Moshoeshoe I in 1822. Moshoeshoe, a son of Mokhachane, a minor tribal chief, chief of the Bakoteli lineage, formed his own clan and became a chief around 1804. Between 1820 and 1823, he and his followers settled at the Buth ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
KwaZulu-Natal
KwaZulu-Natal (, also referred to as KZN and known as "the garden province") is a province of South Africa that was created in 1994 when the Zulu bantustan of KwaZulu ("Place of the Zulu" in Zulu) and Natal Province were merged. It is located in the southeast of the country, with a long shoreline on the Indian Ocean and sharing borders with three other provinces and the countries of Mozambique, Eswatini and Lesotho. Its capital is Pietermaritzburg, and its largest city is Durban. It is the second-most populous province in South Africa, with slightly fewer residents than Gauteng. Two areas in KwaZulu-Natal have been declared UNESCO World Heritage Sites: the iSimangaliso Wetland Park and the uKhahlamba Drakensberg Park. These areas are extremely scenic as well as important to the surrounding ecosystems. During the 1830s and early 1840s, the northern part of what is now KwaZulu-Natal was established as the Zulu Kingdom while the southern part was, briefly, the Boer Natalia Repu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bulb
In botany, a bulb is structurally a short stem with fleshy leaves or leaf basesBell, A.D. 1997. ''Plant form: an illustrated guide to flowering plant morphology''. Oxford University Press, Oxford, U.K. that function as food storage organs during dormancy. (In gardening, plants with other kinds of storage organ are also called "ornamental bulbous plants" or just "bulbs".) Description The bulb's leaf bases, also known as scales, generally do not support leaves, but contain food reserves to enable the plant to survive adverse conditions. At the center of the bulb is a vegetative growing point or an unexpanded flowering shoot. The base is formed by a reduced stem, and plant growth occurs from this basal plate. Roots emerge from the underside of the base, and new stems and leaves from the upper side. Tunicate bulbs have dry, membranous outer scales that protect the continuous lamina of fleshy scales. Species in the genera ''Allium'', ''Hippeastrum'', '' Narcissus'', and ''Tulipa' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Free State (province)
The Free State, known as Orange Free State until the 28th of June 1995 when its name was changed, is a province of South Africa. Its capital is Bloemfontein, which is also South Africa's judicial capital. Its historical origins lie in the Boer republic called the Orange Free State and later Orange Free State Province. History The current borders of the province date from 1994 when the Bantustans were abolished and reincorporated into South Africa. It is also the only one of the four original provinces of South Africa not to undergo border changes, apart from the reincorporation of Bantustans, and its borders date from before the outbreak of the Boer War. Law and government The provincial government consists of a premier, an executive council of ten ministers, and a legislature. The provincial assembly and premier are elected for five-year terms, or until the next national election. Political parties are awarded assembly seats based on the percentage of votes each party receive ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Asparagaceae
Asparagaceae, known as the asparagus family, is a family of flowering plants, placed in the order Asparagales of the monocots. The family name is based on the edible garden asparagus, ''Asparagus officinalis''. Those who live in the temperate climates may be surprised to learn that this family includes both common garden plants as well as common houseplants. The garden plants include asparagus, yucca, bluebell, and hosta, and the houseplants include snake plant, corn cane, spider plant and plumosus fern. Taxonomy In earlier classification systems, the species involved were often treated as belonging to the family Liliaceae. The APG II system of 2003 allowed two options as to the circumscription of the family: either Asparagaceae ''sensu lato'' ("in the wider sense") combining seven previously recognized families, or Asparagaceae ''sensu stricto'' ("in the strict sense") consisting of very few genera (notably ''Asparagus'', also ''Hemiphylacus''), but nevertheless totalling ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
