My favorite flower to plant in my garden is the Dianthus, which is also known as Sweet William. There are over 300 species of Dianthus, and hundreds more of hybrid varieties. One of the reasons I love this flower is that it will grow to cover the planting area and it develops many flowers on one plant. It is a burst of color in your garden!
The Dianthus should get 4-5 hours of full sun each day, so picking the proper place to plant is important. Once a week watering is usually sufficient along with a feeding every 6 to 8 weeks with an all-purpose (10-10-10) liquid fertilizer. The Dianthus does not like being overwatered. Should you give your plants too much water you may notice the foilage start to yellow.
I have been planting Dianthus for many, many years. The pictures below were taken in 1997 and they show Dianthus in my flower bed. You can view the full size picture by clicking on either of the thumbnails below.
These pictures were taken back when I first discovered the Dianthus. You can see these are bright red. Since that time I have planted many different colors in my garden. I now have a favorite variety which I plant every year.
Several years ago I asked a friend, who sold flowers wholesale, if he could get me a few flats of Dianthus. When his shipment came in I was "in love"!
The variety of Dianthus he had gotten for me was "Raspberry Parfait". It is now the only variety I will plant, providing I am able to get it. It isn't always availabe in our immediate area. This year my husband went to several nurseries in a 50 mile radius and was only able to get 2 flats of the Raspberry Parfait variety of Dianthus for me. Thanks hon!
You can see full size images of the flowers I planted this year by clicking on either of the above images. Even though these are the same variety you can see there is quite a difference in the actual shade of the flower.
As part of the assignment we are to explain the difference between a selector and a class and under what conditions would you use each one. My explanations are below.
A selector defines the areas of your page. The "parent" selector is the body. Until you declare other selectors everything on your page will display based on the body selector. Until you create them the <hx> tags will take on a generic formatting based on the body selector. Unless and until you declare selectors you have no control over how your page will appear to a visitor to your site.
Classes can be used with any element on your page using the "class" attibute. On this page I have a class named "beg". This class defines the size and color of a font. If I apply this class to a paragraph on my page, the coding would read: <p class="beg">. Because classes are applied to individual elements, the previous code would change only that paragraph and would not affect any other paragraphs on the page. However; it would look like this:
This paragraph has the beg class applied.
Not very pretty, is it? I suppose you could find a reason to use the class as I did above, but it would not flow with the look of the page in my opinion. That's why I only used this class for the first letter in each paragraph.
This is much nicer.
IndexPart I Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6
Click any link above to check my progress
in the LVS Online Build I course.
