By Lucie Ponsford or Mimosa Garden Design
Welcome to the June edition of Look Local Over the Garden Gate. Today, we delve deeper into our gardening knowledge. We’ve explored apex woodland, grasslands, deserts, the tropics, and water plants. Now, let’s take a step further and understand the distribution of plant groups and their families worldwide. This understanding forms the bedrock of our gardening practices.
Let’s journey back to the beginning of time, to the era of Pangaea. As Pangaea fragmented and continents drifted, the plants that had initially colonized this vast landmass were dispersed across the globe. These plants were influenced by the planet’s evolving atmosphere and varying degrees of light radiation.
It’s fascinating to note that you can find the same plant families and even genera distributed worldwide in diverse forms. Take the pea family, for example, legumes or Fabaceae: the third-largest plant family with more than 20,000 species spanning 765 genera. They include Wisteria from central China, Laburnum from France to the Balkans, Sweet peas in Sicily, Cyprus, and Southern Italy, Broad beans native to the UK, Marama beans from Africa, and Peanuts from America. All part of the pea family, yet each unique in purpose and appearance.
Why is this useful? Ultimately, it demonstrates the evolution of plants to perform in different environments, how we would need to mimic the native conditions to grow them well in some instances, and yet how diverse plants are as they survive in a spectrum of temperate conditions now distributed by gardeners around the world.
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