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By either drying or pressing flowers, you can spend many pleasant hours crafting the summer’s beauty into charming gifts and greeting cards.

You may want to consider growing edible flowers in your garden, or just in pots on a windowsill. If the plant is edible, particularly culinary herbs, chances are good the flower is, too.

Artificial flowers have been made out of just about every medium known to humankind.

Flowers actually do have ways of communicating to the world at large; by scent and by color. That’s how they attract their pollinators. The pollinator stops in for a refreshing sip of nectar and ends up with pollen all over her jodhpurs.

The perfect place to get flowers is in your favorite local flower shop, a farm stand, or your own back yard.

What do you think of when you think of flowers? You think ‘pretty’, you think ‘guilt’, you think ‘wouldn’t it be nice if somebody sent me some’, but you hardly ever, except in the case of a few suggestively-shaped tropical blooms, think ‘sexy’. Of course, red roses do carry a cachet of meaning, but that’s socially imposed. But whether they’re the curved, spiky petals of chrysanthemums, the zig-zag edges of carnations, the straight-forward daisy, or the innocent-looking sweet alyssum , they are saying, in their own way, ‘Hey there, big boy’! Because, lovely though they are, those petals and scents are a screaming come-on to—pollinators. And those flowers are not only easy, they are kinky as all get-out. Most of them want to attract pollinators that are not only not the same species, but whole different kingdoms—insects and birds. Just imagine if...

Flower arranging is the natural follow-up to flower growing. Of course, every time we buy flowers at the supermarket or a roadside stand, we ‘arrange’ them when we cut the stems to fit the vase and plunk them in. But it’s not quite the same thing.

There are few activities that rival the pleasure and satisfaction of growing a garden, and one of the chief delights has to be in the flowers in that garden.

Shopping online is habit-forming and sometimes we forget that there are other ways to do things.