Gardening glossary of terms
When you’re new to gardening, you might not understand all of the terms that are used on the various gardening websites that you might encounter so I thought that it might be a great idea to post some of the more common terms and explain them.
Annual: a plant that completes it life cycle in one growing season and then dies. Keep in mind that annuals for one region of the Country may be a perennial in another region, or even in another Country.
Biennial: a plant that completes its life cycle in two growing seasons and then dies. Generally, the first year the plant produces foliage and the 2nd year the plant flowers.
Bulbs: fleshy leaf bases consisting of scales attached to a basal plate; tulips are one example.
Conifer: mostly evergreen trees or shrubs, usually with needle-like linear leaves and seeds borne naked on the scales of cones.
Deadheading: removing spent flowers or flowerheads for aesthetics, to prolong bloom or promote rebloom, or to prevent seeding.
Feng Shui: the ancient Chinese art of design and placement that balances the chi, or energies, within your surroundings.
Golden Mean: the ration 1:1.618 and a rule of proportion common throughout nature that can be applied to garden design.
Hardiness Zone: determined by the average annual frost-free days and minimum winter temperatures. The Hardiness zones in Canada are rated differently than those of US regions, keep that in mind when you read up on hardiness zones. If you are purchasing a plant in Canada that was shipped in from the states know your USD zones.
Herbaceous: a plant without woody stem; the plant parts are fleshy and wither after each growing season.
Mixed garden: a garden that is planted with combinations of herbaceous and woody plant material.
Neutral colors: green, violet, black, white, gray, brown.
Perennial: a plant that lives three or more years.
Primary hues: red, yellow, blue.
Rhizomes: swollen, horizontal undergrown stem; cannas are examples.
Suckering: describes plant material with adventitious shoots arising from below soil level, usually from the roots rather than the crown or stem of the plant.
Tuber: a swollen, irregularly shaped stem or root used for food storage; dahlias are one example.
Vascular plants: plants such as ferns and seed-bearing plants in which the phloem transports sugar and the xylem transports water and salts.
Warmer colors: yellow, yellow-green, yellow-orange, orange, red-orange, red, and red-violet (magenta).
Woody: A vascular plant that has a stem or more than one stem. Woody plants are trees, shrubs, etc. Most woody plants will be composed mostly of wood.