Each year on March 17th around the world, everyone wants to be Irish. Even the Irish,(instead of the solemn Catholic mass service normally reserved for recognizing saints) began celebrating the exuberant saint's day with drinking festivals, festive banners, and musical concerts more during the last few decades. Mainly for economical and logical decisions to not disappoint their American tourists looking for their Celtic roots.
When visiting Ireland, visitors are enchanted with the lushness of the verdant rolling landscape and colorful flowerbeds. The fairy-like cottage gardens filled with lupines, snapdragons, cabbage roses, daffodils, Canterbury bells, violas, and ivied trellised walls that climb skyward to golden thatched roofs appeal to our sense of charm and enchantment. Dark green beech and stoic laurel hedges kept neatly clipped exemplify the clean, neat lines of formality and protocol of life within clan castles. Touring the ancestral homeland, you can feel the intensity of the Fenian people living off a harsh land but finding joy and peace in the simplicity and fantasy of flowers and fey folk stories. Walking among the quaint cottage gardens or the formal castle gardens can even inspire a fourth-generation Irish progeny to recreate their holiday memories upon their return home.
Wherever your ancestral culture hails from originally, there are themes, plants, and hardscape accessories that will help you recreate your own ancestral garden. Showing your friends and teaching your family what flowers, vegetables, and trees grow in your native country is a great way to spend quality time and also keep alive the values and culture from one generation to the next. You may be surprised to learn that a majority of the plants grown in other countries will thrive whereever you live with the same sunlight and soil moisture conditions, and with proper maintenance. If you cannot purchase the actual plant species locally substituting similar colors, fragrances, and shapes for shrubs and flowers is easy by ordering through a good nursery like Plant Delights. or a number of good plant catalogs. March is a good time of the year to design gardens that will help transport you out of your backyard to another world to relax and meditate or remember your own vacations or childhood memories.
Gardens have been an integral part of Pakistan and India since ancient times growing from its earliest agriculture days to blossoming within Islam into ordered geometric grids called charbaghs. This style of Indian garden defines the garden not only as a landscaping feature but one which reinforces the spirituality of the Islamic culture, dividing the garden into four rivers - a metaphorical reference to Paradise - intersecting in the center of the garden. The four symbolic rivers are made up of water, milk, wine, and honey. You can create a Persian garden in your Central Florida backyard by using tropical flowers, vines, and trees native to India. Walking through a charbagh, you will find orchids, azaleas, begonias, impatiens, globe amaranth, gloriosa lily, foxtail lily, ixoras, clerodendruns, plumbagos, crossandras, mussaenda, primulas, lotus, water lily, and clematis. Trees that do well in zones 9 - 11 include bauhina, cassia, tulip, and coral trees. Fragrance is very important in an Eastern garden and can be emphasized by using the many species of jasmines, such as jasminina sambac and tea olives, osmanthus spp. native to India. Enhancing the mood of the twilight in a Persian garden are bright mosaic tiles, flowing water fountains, reflecting lap pools, candle lighting and pottery, which can be placed to highlight areas of interest.
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