Gardening Complete

How to Best Grow Vegetables, Flowers, and Other Outdoor Plants

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• Publisher: Cool Springs Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780760357651
• eBook ISBN: 9780760363157
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Horticulture
• Index: Biological Sciences

Gardening Complete is the most up-to-date and complete guide to gardening for homeowners. Inside, eight of North America’s top gardening experts—and Cool Springs Press authors—present 19 subjects of critical interest to anyone who wants to learn or broaden gardening skills.

Whether your main interest is in designing landscapes and gardens, ornamental gardening to make your yard more attractive, or gardening to provide nutritious edibles for the family table, this book will become your definitive source of information. It is intended for serious beginning to intermediate gardeners, but even veteran gardeners will be intrigued by what these experts have to say about core gardening skills and common horticultural subjects.
 
Gardening Complete is a practical book that demonstrates how to accomplish the routine activities of gardening and beyond, including:

• Planning and planting your garden
• Essential care for the garden during the growing season
• Dealing with pests and diseases
• Harvesting fruits and vegetables
• Attracting pollinators
• Container, vertical, and raised bed gardening techniques

While many gardening books focus on regional plant species or devote large sections to some form of plant catalog, this book is different. Gardening Complete serves not only as a self-contained manual for gardening skills and information in all regions, but also as a sampler that may help you determine where to focus your gardening hobby in the future or even help you identify authors you’d like to explore further. Each of the eight authors has an impressively broad background in publishing and lecturing on gardening, and you may discover a new favorite writer in these pages. We haven’t just allowed these authorities to express their individual views—we’ve encouraged them to do so. As is true in a healthy garden, we’ve aimed at diversity for this book.
 
This book is not an organic gardening book per se, but if you have any previous familiarity with Cool Springs Press or any of these authors, you will know that we tend to take a low-impact approach to gardening. Thus, our authors generally offer advice that is gentle to the soil, to the environment, and to beneficial insects and animals.

Success in your yard and garden awaits you with the help of Gardening Complete. Our authors are among the most passionate gardeners you will ever meet, and they have helped thousands of home gardeners just like you.

CHAPTER 1

BOTANY FOR GARDENERS

By George Weigel

BOTANY IS THE BRANCH OF BIOLOGY THAT FOCUSES on plant life. It’s a hands-on science that can be very helpful to a gardener because understanding how plants work can drastically cut a yard’s plant death toll.

One of the first bits of this science that gardeners encounter is how plants are named. Names matter a lot in the plant world. They’re the tools that help gardeners sort out minute botanical variations and guide us to the all-important goal of getting the right plant in the right place—the not-so-secret “secret” to successful gardening.

A gardener who ignores plant names (a rose is a rose is a rose…) is much more likely to end up with bland tomatoes and dead shrubs than gardeners who research exactly what to plant where.

Granted, plant names can make eyes glaze over in a hurry—especially when botanists, horticulturists, and other plant geeks throw around those hard-to-pronounce Latin botanical names. But plant experts don’t spout Latin just to show off (usually). They’re using it because it’s a standard system that ensures everyone is talking about the exact same plant everywhere on the planet.

Without it, you might think you’re buying a native perennial flower called bluebells (Mertensia virginica) when you’re actually getting a strappy-leafed spring bulb called bluebells (Hyacinthoides hispanica). Or when you’re talking about your stunning hollyhocks (Alcea rosea), a farm-country gardener might say, “Sounds to me like you’re talking about the outhouse plant” (also Alcea rosea).

The “bugs” you see in your garden may include the essential pollinators, such as this bee.

WHY LATIN?

When primitive gardeners first started trying to figure out the plant world, plants were crudely named—typically by what they looked like. Early scientists began recording these plant names by 200 BC.

That worked fine until people fanned out, cultivated plants for more and more uses, and moved them to other regions. Then it became necessary to standardize names so people in one area knew what people in another were talking about.

Nailing down exact names also became more important as people began using plants medicinally. It’s very helpful to know, for example, that the frilly leafed plant you’re about to eat is Queen Anne’s lace (Daucus carota) and not poison hemlock (Conium maculatum).

A momentous advancement came in 1753 when Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus published a two-volume, 1,200-page book called Species Plantarum. The book laid out a system that grouped plants into a sort of family tree, primarily by their similarity to one another in flower, fruit, and leaf.

The top of Linnaeus’s tree identified “kingdoms” to sort out plants from animals, fungi, and bacteria. Then the system went down a line of division, class, family, genus, and species to further group plants by increasingly intricate characteristics. A classification of “order” also is in the system, but it’s more significant in animals than plants.

Linnaeus used Latin names (and some Greek ones) for his naming system because that was the international language of choice in the 18th-century scientific community. (See “Botanical Order” for more information.)

More than one plant is nicknamed bluebells, but this one is a US-native, spring-wildflower version known botanically as Mertensia virginica.

This is a cultivar—a variation developed from a native species. On the plant tag, it would be identified as Salvia farinacea ‘Evolution’.

BOTANICAL ORDER

Kingdom. According to Linnaeus, Earth has five kingdoms. Plantae, or the plant kingdom, is one of them.

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Divisions. These separ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1 Botany for Gardeners
• 2 Understanding Soil
• 3 Designing your Gardens
• 4 Planting a Garden
• 5 Watering and Fertilizing
• 6 Pruning
• 7 Composting and Mulching
• 8 Gardening by Seasons
• 9 Managing Weeds
• 10 Controlling Pests and Insects
• 11 Controlling Diseases
• 12 Propagating
• 13 Harvesting Edibles
• 14 Gardening with Native Plants
• 15 Water-Wise Gardening
• 16 Gardening for the Birds and Bees
• 17 Container Gardening
• 18 Vertical Gardening
• 19 Raised Beds
• About the Authors
• Index
• Image Credits
• Copyright