Chapter 1

Getting Ready for Gardening

IN THIS CHAPTER

Understanding how plants are named

Examining flowering plants

Checking out trees, shrubs, and vines

Managing your lawn

No matter what your main gardening interest — be it growing vegetables, making your yard colorful with flowers, picking out just the right tree, or aspiring to have the most gorgeous roses on the block — chances are that you care most about the plants. Sure, gardening can also involve landscaping and lawn care (see the chapters in Part 3 of this book), or being able to grow your own food (Part 4), or just having a great excuse to play in the dirt (Part 5), but for most people, the plants make everything worthwhile.

Okay, yeah, I know, you already know you need to plan and prepare your soil to get your garden going, but you really just want to read about plants right now, right? In that case, the rest of this chapter is devoted to the most basic explanations of the kinds of plants you may encounter in the world of gardening. Later chapters in this book go into much more detail about the various types of plants, trees, bushes, and vines, but here I help you get a sense of how plants are similar and different — the first step in turning a brown thumb green. First, though, I explain a bit about names.

Playing the Name Game

What’s in a name? For gardeners, plenty. Gardening is a blend of horticulture and botany, common names and high science, and the names can get a bit confusing. Whether you’re looking at plant anatomy or simply want to know what to call a plant, understanding a bit about naming can help you wade through the garden center aisles, ask better questions, and treat your plants right.

Getting used to plant nomenclature

Whenever you’re talking about plants, knowing how they’re named can help you avoid getting tangled up in the Latin or Greek. Generally, when looking for plants and flowers, you encounter two types of names — botanical and common. Read on for some info on how the naming system works, and then carpe diem — pluck the day!

There is a reason why Latin and Greek are the languages used in naming plants. Latin and Greek have always been the language of scholarship, for scientists worldwide. They’re unchanging, unlike the modern, daily-use language.

Botanical names

The botanical name is the proper or scientific name of a plant. It consists of two parts and is called a binomial (bi equals two, nomial equals name):

• The species name: The species name is kind of like your own first name (except it comes last in a plant’s botanical name).
• The genus name: The genus name is similar to your family name (except in botanical names, it comes first).

For example, in the plant name Hosta undulata, Hosta is the genus name, and undulata is the species name. Hosta describes an entire genus of popular, mostly shade-loving plants named hostas, and undulata describes the type of hosta it is — a hosta with an undulating leaf shape.

The singular and plural for the word species is species.

Sometimes the botanical name has a third name, right after the species name, known as the botanical variety. A botanical variety is a member of the same plant species but looks different enough to warrant its own name, such as Rosa gallica var. officinalis.

Still another botanical name that sometimes comes up is the cultivar, short for cultivated variety. Cultivars are usually named by the people who developed or discovered them, and they’re often maintained through asexual or vegetative propagation for example by cuttings, seed propagation, or the most-modern method of raising large numbers of identical plants in test tubes, called tissue culture. In other words, they’re cultivated (humans grow, improve, and develop them). An example is Lychnis coronaria ‘Angel’s Blush.’ You can use or modify some of these techniques to make more plants yourself. For more details about how to, see Chapter 10.

A hybrid plant is the result of the cross-pollination between two genetically different plants, usually of the same species but different varieties. This combination can happen with human intervention, when the object is to make a new or improved plant or it can occur naturally through bee pollination between two different plants.

Botanical names are more common with some types of plants than others. For instance, you frequently run into them with herbaceous plants, trees, and shrubs but much less so with roses, annuals, and vegetables. You can find botanical names on the labels and in many garden references.

Even though botanical names can be a bit intimidating and sometimes a pain to remember, they’re much more definitive than common names. They’re recognized internationally so anywhere you are in the world, fellow plant lovers will know what plant you’re talking about.

Common names

Common names are what you’re most likely to encounter when shopping for plants to put in your garden, and they’re what you mostly encounter in this book. You can find these names prominently displayed on seed packets or on seedling trays of plants that are for sale. They’re kind of like botanical nicknames that gardeners use to describe a certain type of plant without going into a great amount of detail. For example, the Hosta undulata fits into the genus Hosta, so most gardeners merely refer to these plants under the common name of hostas. And you may know that Hemerocallis is actually the genus name for the common daylily, but chances are that most gardeners you encounter just call them daylilies.

The biggest problem with common names is that the same plant can have many different common names depending on what part of the United States or the world you live in.

Anatomy 101: Naming plant parts

Beyond recognizing the names of plants, knowing the various parts of plants is also useful. Figure 1-1 shows a nice, healthy perennial plant with the basic parts displayed. Botanists use many more descriptive and detailed names for plant parts, but you have enough to remember without getting further confused! You probably already know most of the common ones, but keep these parts in mind, because you need to know them to understand some of the things I discuss in the rest of this book and to speak the language with fellow gardeners. In the figure, the taproot (not all plants have this) is the main root of the plant; the stolon, or runner, is a horizontal stem that spreads underground, sending up more plants as it goes; many groundcovers (pachysandra, ivy, ice plant) operate this way, as anyone who has tried to tug up a patch well knows!

Propagate is a term commonly used in horticulture to describe the process of reproducing or multiplying plants. I discuss it more detail in Chapter 10.

When you know the parts of plants and the difference between all the plant names you run into, you may be ready to get the lowdown on the types of plants out there!

Beautifying with Flowers (and Foliage)

Flowers are often the first thing that comes to mind when people think of gardening and the first thing people plan to grow when they want to beautify their surroundings. Flowers are marvelous because they come in a vast array of sizes, colors, and shapes (see Figure 1-2), and no matter where you live, at least one kind of flowering plant can grow there. Even the volcanic crater of Haleakala, on the island of Maui, is home to a flowering plant: the rare silver sword.

Flowers are more than merely the beautiful display they put on, however. If you know the different types of flowers out there, you can take full advantage of displaying them in your own garden. Read on for info on annuals and perennials, as well as a bit on bulbs and roses.

Amazing annuals

You may already know what annuals are without realizing that you know! These beauties are the flowers, arrayed in flats and pots, for sale every spring down at the garden center —...