Personally, I'd like to be under the sea in an octopus's garden in the shade

Everything seems to be going well with the plants! I check them about every other day to see if they needs water and then normally end up giving them a little bit three times a week. I've decided that it's so nice having other living things in my apartment that I am considering buying a pet. I have narrowed it down to a rat or a hedgehog. Today my friends and I drove way out into the country to find this pet store that supposedly carries hedgehogs only to find no pet store at all. We got totally lost. But! We did find a Petsmart and decided that would do for the day. I found a brown and white rat that is very adorable and smart. She has some personality. So I am thinking about getting her. Rats eat vegetables and I could feed her from the vegetable garden I have at the botanical gardens! It would be so perfect. You can potty train hedgehogs though. You can teach them how to use a litter box. They are very intelligent animals. Either one would be exciting! I am a little nervous though, because even taking care of all these plants requires responsibility. I would want to be confident in my ability to be a good pet caretaker. I think I can handle it though. I'm a pretty responsible young lady.

All that aside, I have been researching all the most interesting gardens of the world lately and I would like to share them with you all. They are very fascinating and I really think that gardens can be beautiful works of art. I don't think people always give gardeners enough credit. You have to have an eye for color, you must be very patient, and you have to be able to work well with your hands. It's something I could definitely get into. Maybe I could even make some sort of garden for this class. Anyways! Here are the amazing, creative gardens! Enjoy.



The Garden of Cosmic Speculation is the brainchild of architect and architectural critic Charles Jencks and his late wife Maggie Keswick, an expert on Asian garden design. Open to the public only once a year, the 30-acre garden is on Jencks's private estate in Scotland. It took nearly two decades to complete.



England's Lost Gardens of Heligan have a storied history of prosperity, neglect and rejuvenation. The once glorious Heligan estate fell into disrepair as World War I creeped into England and priorities shifted. Nature took its course in the decades that followed, swallowing the gardens and obscuring the walkways. It wasn't until 1990 that two descendants of the Tremayne family—the owning family of the estate dating back to 1200—discovered a small garden and decided to revamp the site.



Originally destined to become a fruit plantation, the pristine grounds of Thailand's Nong Nooch Tropical Botanical Garden sprawl over 500 acres. With a year-round tropical climate, the location is versatile enough to have cactus and pineapple gardens, as well as more sculpture-based displays, like the bizarre Umbrella Garden.



here are thousands of people around the world who are active aquascapers—men and women who spend countless hours cultivating spectacular landscapes in fish tanks. Some enthusiasts enter their work in competitions, while others merely seek the satisfaction that comes from difficult design work. Larger-scale aquascapes are often displayed at aquariums, and maintaining the vitality of plants submerged in a tank of water poses a host of challenges not associated with potting a few geraniums.



Weighing in at more than a quarter of a ton, Hotel Indigo claims this is the world's largest hanging flower basket. The 20-foot by 10-foot basket hangs from 25 feet up in the air and took engineers three weeks to build and a solid day of work to install. Over 100 varieties of flowers and plants are in the pot, and, given London's reputation for rain, they will likely have a prosperous future.



Not all gardens are about leisure; some are money-making machines. The roughly 20,000 square hectares of greenhouses on the southeast coast of Spain churn out fruit and vegetables by the ton on a year-round basis, fueling the province of Almería's economy. The greenhouses are packed together so tightly that they're visible from space.

Plants! What are they good for? Absolutely Everything.

Again, please use you're imagination and pretend this post is for Friday January 21 2011.

Lately I have been thinking about plants almost every day of the week! I'm also taking a botany class this semester and I now have three house plants. I also have beans, corn, corms, lettuce, carrots, potatoes and a tincture at the botanical gardens. Talk about a lot of plants! I'm very enthusiastic about this whole experience though. I think that gardening is a very rewarding, useful skill to have.
Because I have been around plants so often I have been thinking a lot about why plants are important in the first place. Plants can be used for clothes, they're used for food, they are synthesized to make almost all medicines, they can be used to make paper, they can be used for shelter, AND they're beautiful. Plants are the source of human life. They're everything. So why do people insist on destroying them? People introduce toxins to plants, they move them out of their natural habitats, they clear them out to put buildings all over the land. I'm convinced that only humans destroy beauty. It makes me frustrated at my own kind, at myself. BUT I think that's why I decided to take botany. I want to give something back to the world. I want to be able to plant plants that I know will not ruin the ecosystem and harvest them and use their gifts, whatever they may be. I think this could become a very positive part of my life.
Something else is bothering me now though. It's the lecture we had this past week about water conservation. I couldn't believe the statistics I was hearing. I knew that running out of water was becoming a bigger threat to the world, but I had no idea that it is almost a reality now. What would this mean for agriculture? What would this mean for plants? It's only been a little over a week and I've already grown attached to my garden. I've already given those plants a lot of my time and care. What if one day we all have to stop caring for our own plants because there's not enough water for people to have their own gardens? Water for plants would be limited to the farmers. Farmers that are a part of huge industries, that America would then have to continue to feed in to and it's these industries that consume all the water in the first place. It's just one big cycle.
It really makes me feel like such a small person sometimes. Who am I? I have no political power. Im not a part of any environmental activism groups. I don't tell people that I am fighting for important humanitarian causes. But then I tell myself: Hey! You're Taylor Bultema. You;re taking classes so you can be get informed about these kinds of things. You have a vegetable garden and three house plants and healing a tincture. And I hold on to that because it's the best I got to offer right now and its good enough for me.

My very first house plant

For those of you who don't know I created this blog for a class where I will be learning, discussing, and making art about nature. This blog will be used to document a plant I received on my first day of class. I will also be reflecting on nature and my relationship with my new house plant! Unfortunately, I am a little behind. We were supposed to start this blog two Friday ago, right after we first got the plant. So please use your imagination and pretend this entry is for Friday January 14 2011
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This week I received a brand new house plant. I discovered that my plant is called Chlorophytum comosum, otherwise known as a spider plant. Spider plants are native to South Africa and therefore don't like being below 50 degrees. They need to be watered once a week and can survive in semi-shady to partial-direct sunlight. For class, we had to come up with ideas of how to house our plant and how to help it survive. Here are sketches of my two ideas:




The first picture is a planter that uses negative reinforcement to get me to water the plant. By having the plant set up to an IV I will be reminded that it is a living thing that is capable of die and will therefore remember to water it. The second image is a planter that uses positive reinforcement to get me to water it. If I give the plant water, the water will power the pot to play a song.
When I was first given my plant I was strangely nervous. It's the first plant I have ever been given. With that comes a pressure to keep it alive. I think I felt that if I killed this plant it would prove in my inability to be a good care taker, or a great gardener for that matter. The pressures of having to be responsible for a living being can be very overwhelming, even if it is just a simple house plant. People don't normally get satisfaction from killing things. At the same time I am thankful that I have something to look after that I can call my own. Taking care of things makes people feel like they have a purpose. Which is a very healthy feeling to have. Right after I got my plant I named it Herb. I've already played it a classical song because I heard that that is stimulating for plants ( I should do some research to confirm or deny this). I think the future will only bring more bonding experiences for Herb and I. So far, he's looking mighty healthy. I am a little concerned though because in order for Herb to get sunlight I have to place him by the window and it is quite cold by my window. I had to take him away for a break because he was looking a little droopy one day, I will have to find a solution to this and will share it with you all in the future. Until next time!

TBultema