Mark McNee

Category: Garden Musings

  • To drain or not to drain that is the question.

    To drain or not to drain that is the question.

    When faced with an area of waterlogged garden the solution put forward is always to put a drain in, as if digging a trench and putting in a length of perforated pipe will magically make the problem go away. If only life was so easy. If you are going to drain a piece of ground…

  • 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…

  • The great grass seed swindle!

    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…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • So how is a plant name constructed?

    A basic plant name consist of a genus which starts with a capital letter and a species which does not both of which should be written in italic or underlined. This is to make it clear you are looking at a proper plant name. Good as this simple system is, and if that was it…

  • Introducing plant names

    I should really start off by saying something about plant names, as this is a real bugbear amongst gardeners. I thing just about everyone who has worked professionally in horticulture has been asked, generally in a tone of exasperation, why do we insist on using these weird names in a language of a people how…