Gardening Basics For Dummies. Steven A. Frowine

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Chapter 1

      Getting Ready for Gardening

      IN THIS CHAPTER

      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!

      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):

      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.

      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.