Gardening - like Botany - is not a hard science!

 

Every time I teach a Botany class, whether it's organised adult education, or just me and the Midweek Botany Crew, I always make a point of reminding everyone that Botany is not a hard science.

What does that mean?

It means that it's not black-and-white. Nothing is set in stone. Plants are variable! In fact, when I give them Rachel's Rules, Rule 1 is “usually”. I say to them, “Pretty much everything that I say to you today can, should, and probably will, be prefaced with the word 'usually'. “

And by that, I mean that our reference books - which, these days, also means the internet, and apps, and TV gardening programmes - may well say “height xx cm” but all that means is that the plant in question “usually” grows to that size. It may be bigger. It may be smaller.

This applies just as much to gardening: and I tell all my Students, Trainees, Mentorees (I'm still not sure if that's an actual word) and casual questioners that whatever I tell them is “usually” the right thing to do, “usually” the right time to do it, “usually” the best way to approach it... but is not necessarily the way it's going to happen.

Why are plants so variable, then?

The weather changes things, which I think most people realise, as it's fairly obvious - “it's rained a lot, so the weeds have put on a spurt”, or “it's been hot for three weeks and the grass is not growing at all”.

But there can be less obvious factors: another example is that if we have a long period of cloudy, dull weather, it can be a serious set-back to those plants which need bright sunlight.

Even the days are different lengths, from one end of the country to the other: in the middle of summer, the northern-most parts of the UK can have between 2-4 hours more daylight than the very south of the country. Of course, to counter-balance this, they get correspondingly shorter days in winter, poor things: but....

 

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Watering plants: when to drench.

 I was talking about how to water new planting, in a period of hot dry weather, the other day and, in very much the same vein, a different Client had a question for me this week about watering, which was quite interesting: she said “All the books say,” (I love it when people start a sentence this way) “... that it's better to do a good drenching once or twice a week, rather than little and often, but what exactly IS a good drenching?”

 

This is absolutely true: if you just give your plants a quick sprinkle every day, you are only wetting the top half-inch or so of the soil, so the plants only need shallow roots in order to get it. Then, the minute it gets hot, or the day you forget to water, or go away for the weekend, they wilt, because they don't have any deeper roots.

By drenching once or twice a week, we persuade our plants that it's better to grow those nice deep roots, which gives them stability from wind and from being knocked over by passers-by, and gives them the ability to seek out the water deeper in the ground.

So we had a nice discussion about watering plants in the garden - I explained that ....

 

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Alchemilla - time to cut them back

 We all love Alchemilla mollis:

 

It's a wonderful cottage-garden style filler plant: a billowy mass of tiny yellow flowers through the summer, tough as old boots, and very generous with seeds: and thereby lies the problem.

Alchemilla does rather spread itself.... I don't actually know anyone who's bought it, but if you do, you only buy one plant, and three years later they are everywhere!

They make wonderful edging plants, for “softening the hard landscaping”, as the books always tell us to do: planting a row of them along the edge of a bed or border will quickly hide any hard edging....

 

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Wildflower meadows in a domestic setting

 I know, I know, I'm always going on about this: it is not possible to create a genuine Wildflower Meadow in a domestic setting, for many reasons.

 

Not least being that you need several acres of poor-quality grassland to start with, and you need a regime of grazing animals to be put on it and taken off it at specific times of year.

So if you are starting with a lush domestic lawn, you are never going to be able to create a “proper” wildflower meadow.

“Most people” ie books, magazines, and - these days - the internet, will tell you that you need to drastically weaken or remove your own grass first: and that is never as easy as it sounds. Merely sowing Yellow Rattle won't do it -.......

 

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