David Domoney’s Gardening Glossary

We use garden lines to help us mark a straight line for things like drills (where seeds need to be sown in lines). A piece of wire is stretched between two posts or upright canes to mark out where we want our straight line to be.

Any plant that is sold ‘Garden Ready’ is ready to be planted immediately into the garden. These are great time savers, as they simply need planting into their position, with no need for further transplanting.

A genus is a group of plants that are all related by having certain characteristics in common. One plant genus groups several different species together, for example the many different species of the rose plant, all come from the Rosa genus.

This is the moment when a seed comes out of its dormant state and starts to grow. Once provided with water, warmth and light a seed will be able to germinate.

This is a term that refers to the killing, intentional or not, of a tree by cutting off a ring of bark around the trunk of the tree. Sometimes this happens accidentally if a tree becomes strangled by something which becomes wrapped around it, such as the vines or roots of another plant.

This is the point when a plant is ready to start producing and shedding seeds. This happens once a plant has finished flowering and is a natural development in its life cycle, often triggered by a change in conditions.

This is the fusing of two plants together by joining a cutting of one plant to the rootstock of another, to create one complete plant. This is done in order to combine the root strength of one plant with the specific fruiting or flowering type of another, so it is possible to easily grow our favourite variety of apples for example, in any size and shape that we want.

Plant-based manure. A crop is grown with the specific aim of digging it back into the soil, before it flowers, to add nutrients.

Ground cover plants are generally low-level foliage and flowers that spread easily to form a carpeted effect in your borders, or underneath trees. This helps to fill odd gaps, insulate your soil in winter and can also help to suppress weeds. Good examples include Juniperus Squamata and Alchemilla Mollis.

The way in which a plant will grow either in direction or shape.

Growing on is a term that generally means gradually moving small young plants to larger containers as they get bigger, before they are planted in their final position.

The tip of a shoot where the plant is growing from.

This describes the period of time when plants are able to grow. For a lot of plants, the main growing season is the time between spring and autumn.