Gardening For Dummies^®

Publisher’s Acknowledgments

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Some of the people who helped bring this book to market include the following:

Acquisitions and Editorial

Project Editor: Nicole McKenzie

Acquisitions Editors: Kristen Hammond, Jane Ogilvie

Developmental Editor: Liz Goodman

Technical Editor: Judy Moore

Editorial Manager: Narelle Walford

Production

Project Coordinator: Amber Cameron

Layout: Lisa Thomson

Illustrator: Anna Warren

Proofreader: Jenny Scepanovic

Indexer: Keyword Editorial

Publishing and Editorial for Consumer Dummies

Diane Graves Steele, Vice President and Publisher, Consumer Dummies

Joyce Pepple, Acquisitions Director, Consumer Dummies

Kristin A Cocks, Product Development Director, Consumer Dummies

Michael Spring, Vice President and Publisher, Travel

Brice Gosnell, Publishing Director, Travel

Suzanne Jannetta, Editorial Director, Travel

Publishing for Technology Dummies

Andy Cummings, Acquisitions Director

Composition Services

Gerry Fahey, Executive Director of Production Services

Debbie Stailey, Director of Composition Services

Authors’ Acknowledgments

First we’d like to thank the Australian staff of Hungry Minds for their hard work: Jane Ogilvie, Acquisitions Editor, and Nicole McKenzie, Project Editor, and the rest of the team. We especially thank Kristen Hammond, former Acquisitions Editor, for her support and enthusiastic promotion of For Dummies gardening books and for getting the project rolling in Australia and New Zealand. We also thank Liz Goodman, Developmental Editor, for her close reading and creative editing of the text, and Jenny Scepanovic, for her careful proofreading. Thanks to artist Anna Warren for most of the illustrations in the book. A big ‘thank you’ also goes to the marketing and promotion team at Hungry Minds, particularly Selina Madeleine, Publicist, and Amanda Healy, Business Development Manager. On a personal note, thanks too are due to colleague Beverley Mohr for her initial help and support. We would also like to thank our families for their support, particularly Shirley’s husband John for his photographs, and Jennifer’s husband James Taylor, who frequently had to cope with kids, pets and meals while deadlines loomed.

Authors’ Dedication

We dedicate this book to all those gardeners who have bought a plant at their local nursery — or even a packet of seeds — and have been seized by a vision splendid of how their garden will grow and blossom. We hope this book will help everyone to grow the garden of their dreams.

Part I

Your Patch of Dirt

In this part...

Gardening is about improving your surroundings and making a beautiful and comfortable environment in which to relax and play. Garden-making is not only a practical and down-to-earth pursuit, it’s also a way of expressing yourself and being creative.

In Part I, we show you how to discover your garden’s potential by working out how much sun and shade it gets and the direction it faces; we give you an understanding of soil and drainage; and, importantly, we finish with advice on how to deal with some of the climate extremes that nature throws at us from time to time.

Introduction

Welcome to Gardening For Dummies, the ‘how to’ book that will help just about anyone to become a successful gardener — from people with only a sunny windowsill to those who have lots of hectares to play with.

In today’s busy and everchanging world, gardens and the plants that grow in them become a friendly refuge where we can forget our worries for a while. Your garden can also be a satisfactory way of expressing your personality and interests. Like the world around us, gardens don’t stand still but grow and change.

We believe that gardening, like cooking and interior decorating, is more accessible now than ever before. For gardeners, much of this liberation has come from the way plants are grown and sold. Modern nurseries have made more plants more easily available and more interesting. Plant selection, finding the plants that will perform well in your garden, is also much easier. Nurseries also cater to the decorative as well as the practical side of gardening and recognise the value of being able to display fully-grown and well-presented plants.

Much as cookbooks no longer have recipes that start off with the words ‘First catch your chicken . . .’, so gardening books can spend more time helping gardeners to create their vision and be informed about their plants, without going into the intricacies of plant propagation and seed collection. To take this to the nth degree, you can buy and plant an instant landscape with fully grown trees, topiarised plants that have already been shaped, annual plants in full flower and ready-to-lay lawns! But few people want a garden as instant as that of course, and we wrote this book for those gardeners who want to create a garden themselves. The more you discover about gardening, the more satisfying it is. After years of gardening ourselves and writing and talking about it to anyone who will listen, we wanted to share our knowledge and expertise. We are also keen to demystify gardening and get rid of some of those misconceptions that spread like wildfire and can make gardening more worrying than it should be.

We’re also keen to provide some keys to allow you to access all the new, interesting and stimulating ideas about gardens and gardening. In this book, we urge you to look around and learn from others, to buy yet more books and magazines that cover gardening, and to venture onto the Web to immerse yourself in the vast wealth of knowledge that’s available via your computer.

If you’ve never gardened before, congratulations on taking the first step. Be reassured that everything you need to know — from how to tackle a bare site to how to move an established tree — is covered in these pages. We also urge you to view gardening not as thankless toil in the hot sun but as a great way to exercise and be creative. Remember, for all the effort you put into your garden you’ll be rewarded in countless ways — with beautiful flowers, fabulous flavours and scents, visiting wildlife and, of course, by just being that bit of the world that’s your own personal paradise.

How to Use This Book

You have in your hands a user-friendly reference guide to gardening. Everything you need to know to get off to a good start in your garden is between these bold yellow covers. You can start reading from any chapter: You don’t need to read the chapters in order, from front to back. If you want to know how to rig up a watering system for your garden, just go straight to Chapter 15!

No matter what area of gardening interests you — growing roses or perennials or just cutting the grass — you’ll find good advice here. And when you outgrow the level of information we give, you can turn to the appendixes at the back of this book for pointers on where to look next.

In every chapter, our basic goal is to give you the information you need to go out to plant, prune or do whatever it is you want. But novices aren’t the only ones who will find this book useful. Gardening is such a huge topic that no-one ever comes close to knowing everything about it. (That’s one reason why gardening has become one of the most popular hobbies of all time.) If, for example, you are a seasoned rose grower but know almost nothing about starting a vegetable garden, Chapter 10 is an amazing source of information on incredible edibles.

Throughout this book, information is presented in ways that are readily understood, so you’re ready to go. You’ll find lists of plants to help you choose the ones you need to create a beautiful garden: We list the plants alphabetically, with the common name first, followed by the botanical name. Also, whenever we are describing plants, we give plant heights and spreads and provide other useful information such as spacing, depth of planting and what you need to do to ensure it thrives. In short, everything is at your fingertips!

To make this book as accessible as possible, we’ve split it into six major parts, followed by four appendixes. Each part is divided into several chapters.

Part I: Your Patch of Dirt

We show you how to analyse and understand the elements of your garden so you can better plan and plant. Then we tell you all about climates and microclimates and ways in which you can control the climate.

Part II: Planning and Designing Your Garden

Like all good things, a garden thrives with a little planning. We touch on the key elements of landscaping, go into the details of designing or planning a garden, with emphasis on making a rudimentary plan that you can refer to and refine later. Then we introduce you to some particular styles of garden to give you some ideas for your own.

Part III: Plants for All Occasions

Here’s where you get down and dirty! This part is the heart of the book because, for most people, the essence of gardening is putting in plants and watching them grow.

We divided plants up into different groups according to what they can do for your garden — such as provide shade, smell fragrant or look pretty — and on the level of care they need to survive. We also tell you how you can grow some of your own food, discover what it takes to grow a garden in pots and containers, as well as lawns, grasses and groundcover plants.

Part IV: Tried-and-True Gardening Techniques

Planting is easy — we tell you everything you need to know about the basics of plant care, including feeding, mulching and composting; watering and pruning; and starting seeds and growing from cuttings.

Part V: Gardening All Year Round

In a nutshell, this part covers long-term garden maintenance. We look at what you need to do to keep your garden tidy, the equipment and tools you’ll need to accomplish as much as you’d like, and what you need to do to control plant diseases and pests.

Part VI: The Part of Tens

This part is devoted solely to no-nonsense advice. The Part of Tens presents ten great gardening tales and offers tips for staying safe in your garden.

Part VII: Appendixes

One exciting feature about gardening is the endless amount of information available on just about every aspect of it. The appendixes we’ve compiled here are intended to help you find what you want straight away.

The variety of plants, seeds and tools that you can buy through the mail or via the Web and have delivered the next day is astounding — you can outfit your entire garden. Mail-order is the way to go, especially if you’re looking for anything unusual or want to save money by buying in bulk.

We’ve also zeroed in on useful books, magazines and Web sites for gardeners. All good, useful information to expand your green horizons.

Icons Used in This Book

Look for these icons in the margins to help you zero in on the information you want.

Points out ecological tips and ways to be earth-friendly.

These tips are words of gardening wisdom based on Shirley’s many years of gardening in many parts of the world.

This icon signals that we’re going to delve a little deeper than usual into a subject. Not that the information is too difficult to understand — just rather more detailed.

Suggests ways to save money.

This icon flags information that even some experienced gardeners may not know.

Indicates plants that really perform and are worth hunting for in your nursery.

Watch out! Alerts you to common pitfalls and problems, including some that may cause injury.