Word: pollenation
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...everything from peat moss to chamois-colored gloves with green thumbs, companies such as Jackson & Perkins and Burpee begin years in advance to cross-fertilize flowers to achieve the blend of color, size and hardiness to captivate this spring's buyer. To produce a new hybrid, employees brush pollen individually onto the pistils of 10,000 roses, consider themselves lucky if three of the resulting 100,000 seedlings seem worth cultivating. The Mexicana rose cost $50,000, not an extravagant expenditure if only 1% of the nation's 35 million rose growers...
...wholesalers who cater solely to the burgeoning number of suburban garden markets. Among the new leaders is Vaughan's Seed Co., which quit the mail-order business four years ago, now grosses $10 million, as compared to Burpee's $7,000,000. Vaughan's flies pollen all the way from Guatemala to fertilize flowers in California, buys tulips from Holland, begonias from Belgium, amaryllis from Africa...
...creations of nature are more exotic than the flowers that trap insects in order to transfer pollen from their male to their female reproductive organs. Though the workings of these trap flowers were known by Charles Darwin, their intricate mechanisms are only now coming to light...
...numerous species of traps use ingenious methods to cover the insects imprisoned in the blossom with the sticky pollen that they carry to the flower's close-at-hand female sex organ as they try to escape. After a night inside the Aaron's-rod flower, mosquitoes find themselves literally snowed under by pollen, while flies caught by the lily-like arms of another trap flower must wade through mounds of pollen to move from one part of the caldron to another. The curved hollow of the purplish-green Dutchman's-pipe is pocked on the inside...
With a total of $483,000 paid for 40 works in a scant hour, Peregrine Pollen, representative of Parke-Bernet's new owner, Sotheby's of London, saw nothing but blue sky ahead for U.S. modern art. "Breaking records doesn't mean too awfully much, does it?" said Pollen. "Look at the mile. It's broken every...