This is a water based solution which has a pH below 7. Most acid soil lie in the range of 7 to 5 though some peat soils may be lower.

This is a water based solution which has a Ph above 7. Most alkaline soils (also called basic soils) lie in the range 7 to 9.

This is a pattern that tied individual components together both structurally and visually and comes in a variety of styles including stretcher, Flemish, English, English Garden Wall, Herringbone and Random.

This is one of the commonest method of constructing a brick wall which is more than ½ a brick thick and consists of alternating courses of heads and stretchers.

Botanist quickly found Latin lacked words they needed to describe the parts of a plant, the Romans having never seen any need to do such things, so they modified the language for their own needs. The school Latin you may have learnt  has evolved considerably since the Romans; to the point a Roman would hardly recognise it. This has lead to Botanical Latin, which has branched off from ‘School Latin’, and has developed its own means for words and grammar. Anyone wanting to learn more would do well to look at Botanical Latin by William T. Stearns which is the standard text on the subject. Its very heavy going though!

A small regular building unit traditionally made from fired clay but occasionally concrete. They have been used for thousand of years in various sizes and still are available in a range of sizes; with different standard sizes in different countries. In addition to the normal cuboid shape bricks are also many  other shapes available for specific purposes and these are called “specials”. Standard UK brick with nominal dimensions

The convention for describing the thickness of a wall is relative to the length of a brick so goes like this. It may seem counterintuitive, and often causes confusion, but as its long established deviating from it will lead to even greater confusion. A ½ brick wall which was sometimes called a 4 inch wall is: A 1 brick wall which was sometimes called a 9 inch wall: A 1½ brick wall which was sometimes called a 14 inch wall: And so on, so the next is a 2 brick wall (18 inch wall) and then a 2½ brick wall (22 inch wall).  

This is anything constructed from bricks which are normally fired clay, yes we are really still building from mud! The small size of the individual bricks makes brickwork and incredibly flexible building material to make garden structures out of. A few points to note: The thickness of a brick wall is described relative to the bricks length so the wide of a wall goes up in half brick steps starting with a ½ brick. The mortar between the bricks is there to keep the bricks apart and stop them wobbling, it DOES NOT STICK the bricks together! In fact to an engineer brickwork has no tensile strength, that is to say it has little or no strength when being pulled apart. Most bricks have little resistance to frost when wet so unless engineering bricks are being used things like retaining walls will need to have the brickwork protected from moisture.

This is a plant which has been selected in cultivation because of specific characteristics it shows which separate it from its wild origins and other cultivars. The rules regarding what is a cultivar, how it is named and how the word is used are laid down in the International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants. Only plants which are not found in the wild can be called cultivars and to show that they are the cultivar name is written in normal upright letters and enclosed in single quotation marks.

A plant with the male and female flowers on separate plants. For example, Holly.

These are catalysts which drive and control all the processes in living things. These are proteins just like muscle and hair and work as a result of their complex structure. Catalysts are something which causes a chemical reaction to occur but remain unchanged by the reaction so that it can repeatedly act on the same reaction.

This is a catch all term for plants which need acidic soil to grow in.

This is a group of closely related genera and the names should be written in italics (or underlined) and start with a capital letter. The names of plant families should end in the letters –aceae; but some long established names which do not have this ending are still used, all be it with standardised alternatives used in parallel.

This is a collection of very similar species and forms the first part of a plant’s scientific name. For example Alchemilla in Alchemilla Mollis and as such it is very important in the naming of plants. Ideally it would be best to have a clear definition as to what constitutes a genus and the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants goes into great detail as to how a genus should be named. It does not though make any attempt to nail down what actually constitutes a genus and for a very good reason – you can’t. In practice it would be impossible, plants evolve into genera in what ever way evolution takes them and only much later to people come along and try to group them into genera, species, etc. In the end a genus is a collection one or more species which a consensus has been arrived at that they should be placed together because of there botanical similarities.

This tends to be used, principally in professional horticulture, to refer to the none plant parts of a garden. So landscaping an area would be divided into either hard or soft landscaping. Generally this doesn’t include the soil and compost but where there is a lot of earth moving that could be included in hard landscaping and then the preparation of the ground for planting would be soft landscaping.

These are plants with no woody stems lasting from one year to the next. Some have leaves which persist from one year to the next but by enlarge they die down to the ground at the end of each summer. Hardy perennial grow by spreading horizontally and tend to establish and flower quicker than trees and shrubs.

The proper name for a weed killer. It’s formed from ‘herb’ meaning a plant (from the latin herba meaning a green plant) and ‘icide’ meaning it kills things. So you get insecticide, fungicide, biocide, pesticide, etc.

The International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants (ICN) is as the title says the set of rules that govern how plants, fungi and algae are named and how the names are arranged into ever broader groups. The last published edition was the Vienna code but it is soon to be replaced by the Melbourne code s soon as it is published.

The International Code of Nomenclature for Cultivated Plants (ICNCP) lays down a set of rules in an attempt to standardise the way plants produced or selected by humans, as opposed to wild plants, are named. It is in effect a supplement to the International Code of Nomenclature for algae, fungi, and plants (ICN).  The first edition of the code was published in 1953 with the hope of applying some order to the naming of cultivated plants and in 1988 Hortax, a committee if plant taxonomists, was set up to supervise its continued development. The most recent edition, the 8th, was published in 2009.

From the word landscape, originally landskip, which was an artist term referring to a country scene which was painted. Later the word was combined with gardening to give us landscape-gardening and this has been further contracted to landscaping. The term landscape-gardening only really can into use with the English Landskip movement of 18th century. It generally refers to the construction of ornamental gardens, either public or private, and commercially it is often split into soft and hard landscaping.