Flower gardening is why we do what we do and here are some practical diy hints and tips to help make your garden better.
One of the first - and most important things - I'm always preaching is the single most important thing in the garden. That is the ability of the gardener to relax when things aren't going well. Yes, insects will always take bites and look like they're wrecking plants (plants are really resilient and most-often bounce back). Yes, that's one ugly insect but the ugliest ones often turn out to be predators eating all those smaller and less-visible insects that are doing the damage. (lady bird beetle larva look like miniature dragons!)
The second thing I'm always preaching is to learn how to water your garden properly. Plants might survive without a lot of water but few, very few, thrive. Surviving isn't thriving in my garden.
And the third is to learn how to feed your plants properly using organic techniques. Doug's first law of gardening states, "You only have to feed your plants if you want new leaves, flowers or fruit."
"It is indeed astonishing that the asters, helianthus, rudbeckias, silphiums, and numberless other fine North American plants, all so easily grown and so handsome, should be entirely neglected in English gardens, and this in favour of carpets, hearthrugs, and ribbons, forming patterns of violent colours, which, though admired for being the fashion on the lawn and borders of our gardens and grounds, would not be tolerated on the floor of a drawing-room or boudoir."
"As new and strange plants were brought by curious-minded people into gardens, a real difficulty in the matter of providing them with names arose. Many of us today are amused at the seriousness the botanist attaches to mere names. Sometimes we wish most devoutly that he coin less tongue-twisting names, but what we suffer at his hands is as nothing compared to what the would-be student of plants in the early eighteenth century endured. For example, Acer Americanum, folia majore, suptus argenteo, supre viridi splendente, floribus multis coccineus is the way Miller in his first edition of his Dictionary set forth our common Red Maple, which Linnaeus later dubbed Acer rubrum."
