This week we’re showcasing our favorite Iris photos from flickr – enjoy!
Purple Bearded Iris:

photo credit: amandabhslater
Pink Iris:

photo credit: Donnaphoto
Purple Iris:

photo credit: faeparsons
And finally this gorgeous group of Irises – entitled “mmmm colour” -

photo credit: nicer than air

Welcome to our first in a series of flickr flower photo highlights – check back as we select our favorite flower pictures each week!

photo credit: arvindgrover

photo credit: lissalou66

photo credit: [lauren nelson]

photo credit: elbfoto
Happy Spring!

(ARA) – Stroll your neighborhood and chances are you’ll spot landscape shrub roses decorating someone’s garden or backyard. Take a drive into town, and you’ll see them planted at your favorite shopping center.
If you haven’t noticed, landscape shrub roses have taken the country by storm. In home gardens, in containers and along highways, these low-maintenance [...]

Bonsai is in a way like photography – it is possible to buy dozens of expensive ‘add-ons’ to the basic equipment. Some of these are helpful, others merely give you the feeling that ‘Gee, I’m really an artist’. Tools do not make the artist – the artist uses tools.
But there are tools which are essential [...]

Say ‘art’ and most will think of painting or sculpture. There is a kind of sculpture, though, that takes as its raw material not stone or wood but a living tree. That is the art of bonsai.
From the Japanese word for ‘tree in a tray’, Bonsai is the art and product of shaping trees by [...]

Though no bonsai is easy to train or care for, pine is among the easier species. More tolerant to drying, they adapt well to a pot and often require only regular trimming and biannual repotting.
In the wild, pine commonly grow to 50 feet or more with trunks that are a foot in diameter and larger. [...]

Maples come in a variety of sub-species, but all of them make beautiful bonsai trees. Slightly more difficult to care for, they are nonetheless greatly in demand by bonsai enthusiasts. Their leafy appearance is attractive, particularly in the fall when they turn to yellow and red, just as do the full-sized maples.
Some varieties thrive well [...]

Kengai (Cascade)
The cascade style is among the more beautiful and desired, but also more difficult to achieve. The trunk grows down below the level of the container, often twisting as it does so.
In nature, a tree growing near a cliff subject to heavy snows, avalanches and wind may assume this inverted position. Those forces are [...]

The craft of shaping miniature trees in a small pot first arose over a thousand years ago in China, where it was known as pun-sai.
Even then the variety of individual bonsai was astonishing, as known from ancient drawings. Gnarled, faux-windswept trunks, with sparse leaves to full-flowering miniature blossoming trees dot the historic record.
The Chinese artists [...]

Trees are amazingly self-sufficient. They take in needed elements from the environment without having to move to fetch it as animals do. But that can be a limitation as well, since they are dependent on finding what they need nearby.
In the case of most trees, elements leech through the soil and into contact with the [...]