IN THE GARDEN
1. Take a moment to relax and enjoy your garden. Gardening jobs for August 2. Harvest crops such as lettuce, carrots, beetroot, beans, sweetcorn and onions. 3. Continue deadheading flowers in your borders and pots to encourage more flowers. 4. Take softwood cuttings of plants such as lavender, pelargoniums and penstemons. 5. Pinch the growing tips out of tomato plants in the garden to encourage fruit to develop and ripen.
6. Keep pots well watered.
The plants were alien to me, with enormous leaves and exotic blooms
Plants show a range of adaptations to these conditions. The tallest emergent trees have buttress roots to help stabilise them, and tree trunks have smooth bark to help water flow freely to the roots. Waxy leaf surfaces and drip tips help channel water from leaves to prevent diseases. Woody vines (lianas) climb up in search of light and produce leaves and flowers in the rainforest canopy. Meanwhile, epiphytic plants are those that grow on host plants without taking nutrients from them. They gather moisture and nutrients from the air, rain and debris high in the forest canopy. Exploring the Botanic Garden The Tropical Houses at Cambridge University Botanic Garden grow a host of plants to inspire and create wonder.
to attract pollinating beetles. Perhaps not a horticultural beauty in everyone’s eyes, but certainly a botanical curiosity. The calabash nutmeg ( Monodora myristica ) is a tree bearing speckled, lantern-like flowers up in the canopy of our Tropical Houses. Carludovica palmata (Panama hat palm) produces large, pleated, fan-like leaves and is used to produce Panama hats. Members of the ginger family are at home in the tropical conditions here, and include the beehive ginger ( Zingiber spectabile ) and the torch ginger ( Etlingera elatior ). Several Dutchman’s pipes scramble
The one that seems the most captivating to visitors is the jade vine ( Strongylodon macrobotrys ), an endangered bat-pollinated liana from the rainforests of the Philippines, which can reach 20m in height and produces pendent clusters of brilliant-turquoise, claw-like flowers along a central stem (racemes). But other plants are equally beguiling. The titan arum ( Amorphophallus titanum ) is native to the rainforests of Sumatra. Unfortunately for us it is shy to bloom, but the flower has a ruffle-like collar, an erect thick spike of tiny flowers (spadix), grows up to 3m tall and emits a foul aroma
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