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To sow or turf
Once we have decided to create a lawn one important question has to be tackled – are you going to do it by sowing grass seed or by turfing and each has its pros and cons. Sowing: Cheaper More tolerant of drying out Needs better preparation Can only be done when frost is not a…
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Buying for the garden
One of biggest problems that retailers selling to gardeners have is names. Plant names, chemical names, compost names, what ever they try to sell to gardeners there always seems to be some impenetrable name between the product and the customer. How the shop handles this divides the good from the rest. For it is not…
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The great grass seed swindle!
In about the last 40 years grass seed has undergone a revolution, when I was an undergraduate perennial rye grass was the tufty grass you tried to avoid in anything but the areas of long grass due to its course nature and inability to tolerate close mowing. Suffice to say things have changed a lot…
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Subbase
This is a layer of crushed stone used under paving to form, in effect, a stable foundation for it and is found between the bedding course and the subgrade. It is made of stone which has been crushed and sieved stone to end up with a mixture of sizes from normally about 40 mm down…
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Is Chelsea 2012 Still About Gardening?
Chelsea is over for another year and this year it was blessed with excellent weather. I haven’t been this year but I’ve watched the coverage on the television and while you miss some of the atmosphere the camera crews get far better access to the gardens than joe public. There is an element of garden…
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Bees need sound arguments not sound bites
A lot of publicity was given to the Friends of the Earth’s demonstration outside of Chelsea Flower Show this week highlighting the recent report commissioned by them on bees. The message of the demonstration was to get pesticides banned and they maintained their report supported this. Now peaceful demonstration is a fundamental right of everyone…
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Hard Landscaping
This tends to be used, principally in professional horticulture, to refer to the none plant parts of a garden. So landscaping an area would be divided into either hard or soft landscaping. Generally this doesn’t include the soil and compost but where there is a lot of earth moving that could be included in hard…
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Soft Landscaping
This loose term is more frequently seen used within professional horticulture but simply means the soft things that grow ( i.e. plants) and the soil or compost they grow in. So it includes trees, shrubs, hardy perennials, grass, etc.. It generally doesn’t include vegetables grown purely for consumption, there are a number of very ornamental…
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Landscaping
From the word landscape, originally landskip, which was an artist term referring to a country scene which was painted. Later the word was combined with gardening to give us landscape-gardening and this has been further contracted to landscaping. The term landscape-gardening only really can into use with the English Landskip movement of 18th century. It…
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Nutcutts Book of Plants
It may seem strange to include in this list what is to a large part a nursery catalogue, and it is unashamedly in a part an advertisement for Nutcutts. The thing is it is a treasure trove of information on garden plants presented in a concise and assessable style. Thought the content is about the…
