Confused about gardening terms such as carbon gardening, endemic, companion planting and ornamentals? Don’t despair – we provide a quick rundown of the most common gardening terms, and find out more about the latest gardening buzzwords...
Common gardening words
- Annual – plants which live for one year only.
- Perennial – plants which live for a number of years. Some, however, might go dormant (die back) in winter and re-sprout in summer.
- Deciduous – plants which lose their leaves in winter.
- Evergreen – plants which are green the whole year round.
- Ornamentals – plants that provide colourful decorative elements to the garden. Roses, flowering annuals, flowering perennials and flowering shrubs are known as ornamentals.
- Frost hardy/tender – plants that can cope with frost are called frost hardy. Those that die if frosted are called frost tender.
- Full sun – a spot in the garden that gets sun all day, all year round.
- Full shade – a spot in the garden that gets heavy shade, all day, all year around (under large, dense, evergreen trees).
- Dappled shade – occurs under a tree that has a light covering of leaves, enough to let some patches of sunlight through.
- Semi shade – means an area that gets some shade or sun at some part of the day. This might be afternoon sun or morning sun, or afternoon shade or morning shade.
- Soil pH – the pH of your soil describes if it is acidic or alkaline.
- Indigenous – plants which occur naturally in South Africa.
- Endemic – plants which occur only in a particular area or region.
Buzzwords
- Organic gardening – a method of gardening that specifically aims to improve and maximize the garden soil's health, structure, texture, as well as maximize the production and health of developing plants without using synthetic commercial fertilisers, pesticides, or fungicides.
- Companion planting – the cultivation of different types of plants in close proximity so as to benefit each other in one way or another.
- Carbon gardening – refers to an environmentally conscientious approach to gardening that aims to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
- Alien plant; exotic plant – both terms refer to a plant that is not indigenous to a particular country. The former term is more commonly used to describe non-indigenous plants that have become problem plants in the country in question.
- Invasive plants – these are plant species that have been introduced from other countries and have spread like wildfire in their new environment. The tendency of invasive alien plants (IAPs) to spread so much is a result of more favourable climatic conditions – warmer winters, more rainfall – than in their country of origin, and because the insects and diseases that plague them in their native lands are often absent in their new homes.
- Ecosystem – a system that includes all living organisms in an area as well as its physical environment that function together as a unit. An ecosystem is made up of plants, animals, micro-organisms, soil, rocks, minerals, water sources and the local atmosphere interacting with one another.
- Biodiversity – the variety of plant and animal life found in an ecosystem. Biodiversity is a measure of the health of an ecosystem, with healthy ecosystems having greater variety and variation in plant and animal life than unhealthy ones.
- Water wise gardening – the development and maintenance of a garden that relies mainly on the local rainfall to meet its water needs and uses as little municipal water as possible.
- Water wise plants, water smart plants, low water usage plants – plant species that use less water than other plant species. Typically they originate in those parts of the world that have low annual rainfalls. As South Africa is a dry country most indigenous plants are low water usage plants.
