Monday, April 19, 2010

Daffodil BONANZA!

I had my steel design exam this morning and I think it went really well.  I only got a little confused with the lateral torsional buckling part of designing a beam-column.  Fortunately the exam had a 5% bonus available so even with this little issue I could do really well.  In celebration I took a bunch of pictures in the Civic Gardens.  I'll start off today with 10 different daffodils.  Although some below may appear relatively close, there is something that sets them all apart.  The diversity of colour and flower structure in just one garden is astounding!

This first one is my favourite.  I love the big round, delicate white outer petals and the beautiful orange tip to yellow gradient in the corona.  It is just gorgeous!
 Now this looks similar to the previous flower.  The petals are sturdier, with more yellow, and have tips.  The orange ring at the edge of the corona is also less pronounced.
Simple white petals with a bright yellow, heavily frilled corona.
These are a dwarf yellow variety.  The flower diameter is about half the typical size and there are often multiple flower heads on the same stem.  The petals are very pointed, and the corona is quite extended and ruffled.
These flowers have a lot of fine detail.  The outer petals dip in towards the centre and then outwards again into a point.  The corona really opens up outward and is heavily textured, with a nice gradient from yellow to white at the tips.
A yellow variety with forward, twisting petals.  They are slightly creamy which gives a bit of a contrast to the bright yellow interior.  The corona is cylindrical but abruptly opens at the end where it is heavily textured.
This variety has strong white petals.  The corona is actually split in a few regions and just about flush to the petals.  This flower is a bit of a mutant and has and extra which part sticking out of the centre of the corona.
This is the non-mutant version of the flower above.  The corona is not split anywhere.
This variety is similar to the one above but the corona is held out further away from the petals and has a creamy colour.
The variety is very interesting.  It's similar to the first one but the corona is tiny.  Very nice.
Hopefully you've enjoyed these daffodil blooms!  If anyone would like to argue with me that some flowers are not distinct enough to be different feel free.  :)  Also if I'm not using the proper terms for the anatomy of the flower just let me know.  Stay tuned, there are more flower pictures to come over the next few days.

I also made a walk through video of some greenhouse areas that I'll be uploading.  Now I have to get back to studying for structural dynamics (building movement due to earthquakes, wind loading, machine shaking, etc.).  Hope everyone has a great day!

UPDATE:  OMG I just checked my email and got a $1000 bursary!  I have tonnes of loan debt to pay off so this helps!

12 comments:

  1. Very nice! The one with the flatish corona is interesting.

    ReplyDelete
  2. It is eh? I've never seen one like that before. There were only two of that kind (that I saw) in the entire garden complex.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I think the "petals" are sepals: the actual petals are all fused together into a single unit and form the corona. I could be wrong about this, but I think I remember something to that effect.

    They are, of course, pretty, no matter what everything is called.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I was confused by that. It looked to me like the corona was separate, three of them are petals and the other three are sepals (alternating). I'll try and confirm that.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Beautiful Daffy's! The second to last shot, Mount Hood? They generally start out pale cream and become more and more white until they turn. My favorite variety.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Beautiful. I think daffodils are often overlooked because they are so popular. To me, it's one of those flowers that you really need to look at closely to fully appreciate.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Laura, I have no idea. I think that one has my favourite flower structure though. Yeah, twitter!

    Thomas, I agree. I've always thought of daffodils and one of the least desirable spring bulbs. Today I took a good look and was delighted. There not that nice from far away but delightful up close.

    ReplyDelete
  8. How beautiful and distinct they all are! I love the frilly one that goes from pale yellow to white and very frilly. I think it would be nice to have a lot of varieties in your garden though if you could manage it space-wise. I had them when I lived in north Florida, but they will not grow here...:(

    ReplyDelete
  9. In school we had to learn all the different divisions of Daffodils but this was about a year before I took flower morphology and learned in detail about botanical floral parts. I think the outer ring would be sepals and the inner ring petals and collectively they would be tepals (at least that is how it works in the rest of the family). The corona or trumpet is just a modified part of the tepals. But I could be wrong and Google isn't being helpful.

    ReplyDelete
  10. The flowers are Simple and beautiful. I love the structure of the flowers and also the color combination of white and orange. The orange color is looking prettier because of the white color.

    By looking at these flowers I can say that short is always sweet.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Julie, I agree the highly textured ones are better. I think you need a lot of varieties to keep things interesting. It's too bad you can't grow them there!

    Kaveh, I looked it up and the three slightly behind the petals are sepals. However when they look similar to petals they are referred to as tepals. So there are three petals with three tepals behind them (alternating). I think the corona is just further modified petals.

    Rajani, I like the shorter ones. The flowers seem less flimsy. The orange punch is really nice!

    Stevie, sure is! Thanks!

    ReplyDelete

Thanks for contributing!

Related Posts with Thumbnails