Notebook Radiant orchid: colour of the year T
he colour hawks from the Pantone Colour Institute have been at it again and although they did not
do well with the 2013 choice of emer- ald for colour of the year (most people gravitated to a vibrant blue), they may do better this year with Radiant Orchid, a rosy purple, which they promote as projecting great joy, love and health. Radiant orchid is purple with pink
undertones. To be very precise the Pantone colour is 18-324. Purple symbolizes uniqueness and creativ- ity. The logical colour to pair it with is amethyst, says Pantone.
Be prepared for the beguiling charm of radiant orchid.
There hasn’t been a purple since 2008
and it was described more as blue with the name Blue Iris. How is this going to be reflected in
the garden? You can start with radiant orchid containers to add a note of fash- ion to your garden passion, but as is always the case with the colour of the year, its interpretation by nature is some- what varied. That fits in well with the trend this
year of going back to single colour or tone on tone floral containers, doing away with the eclectic, multi-coloured baskets of the past few years.
About trees and how they grow W
hen you carve your initials into a tree at eye level, do the initials grow higher with the tree or stay at the eye level?
Depending on your age when you did the deed, a decade
later, your eye level may have changed, but the height at which you carved your initials would not. That’s because plants grow in a linear fashion with cell upon cell growing from the stems’ tips which are called apical meristems. The meristems are the mechanism for growth in plants and are located at the tips of branches and roots. However, a specialized type of meristem, called vascular
cambium, is also at work expanding the girth of the tree and so your initials may become distorted as the circumference of the tree changes. Trees are far more complicated than we generally think.
That sturdy trunk has many layers. Outer bark. The outer layer is bark which is designed to
protect the tree from such things as temperature, insects, fungi and other diseases. And not all bark is equal. It can be as thick as one foot in a Douglas fir to very thin such as the bark of birch trees which is papery and peels. Bark is formed by specialized meristems sometimes called phellem. The phloem. Also called the “bast”, this fibrous material
layer is responsible for taking the sugar rich products manu- factured through photosynthesis in the leaves to all parts of the tree. The Cambium. Just inside the outer bark is the cambi-
um layer, one cell thick. These are the meristem cells, which produce phloem on one side and xylem or sapwood on the other. This is where the rings of the tree are formed. The outside of this ring is the growth that occurs in spring. The inside is growth that occurs over summer. These are the gins we count to determine the age of the tree. Sapwood. The other name is xylem and this is the layer that draws water, nitrogen and minerals from the soil up to
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You can learn alot by looking at tree rings.
the leaves. Heartwood. This is the dead part of the tree that provides
a sturdy central core to provide structure and strength. It is often darker than the inner sapwood. Pith. The very center of the tree made up of parenchyma
cells and air spaces. These cells do a little of everything, from storing water to assisting with the transport of water and sugars from the xylem and the phloem layers. Animal growth is totally different in that our cells spread
out in pre-determined patterns in all directions. When you carve your initials in a person, as in tattoos, the mark grows up in height with you.
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