Online Gardening Advice – GardenRant

I’ve not been too well this week. For the first time in years I’ve been tucked up in bed for several days with hot tea as my body fights whatever this malaise is; I’m very rarely ill at all, and this has really taken me out. Woken at some godforsaken hour by the feeling that someone has stabbed me in the throat (illness always seems so much worse at night), I tried to distract myself with some nocturnal Facebook browsing.

Big mistake.

Algorithms

I look at a lot of plant and gardening content on the internet, usually aiming for specific resources and nursery websites.

Nevertheless, those shadowy algorithms that follow us around the internet seem to think that if I look at some horticultural content I should be looking at all of it.

Mixed Quality

Sometimes I come across something really good online, an article or post that is accurate and insightful.

I read rather a lot of quite mediocre stuff, with sometimes slightly dubious content given as ‘fact’.

Yet I’m seeing more and more content so outlandishly inaccurate that it astonishes me that people have the audacity to produce it, let alone release it to the internet as serious advice.

An American Icon

Martha Stewart is a household icon in the US, possibly Canada too(?), but not really in the UK. We’ve heard of her though, and I believe she’s highly respected. The ‘Martha Stewart brand’ should represent the best, right?

So with a mixture of pain, exhaustion and the irritation of reading an article titled “8 Plants You Should Never Grow Next to Roses”, I find myself sitting at my desk to write this article at 1am.

What’s Wrong?

I’m intrigued by the idea of there being plants you should never grow next to roses. Do they fight? Are there plants that will reach their stems down into the ground and dig your roses out during the night?

The article follows two lines: fungal problems and competition for resources.

Allegedly common lilac, Syringa vulgaris, will compete heavily for resources with roses. Now some lilacs have a fairly robust root system that helps them cope with hot and dry summers. If you have a small rose planted right next to a large lilac then yes, quite possibly, you might get conflict between the two.

Yet the same would be true of a range of trees and shrubs grown in gardens. Sometimes plants don’t get along it you have a very vigorous plant already well-established and you’re trying to get a weaker plant to take, but this isn’t really peculiar to roses.

The article also lists lilac, snapdragons, potatoes, tomatoes and peppers (does anyone actually grow potatoes, tomatoes and peppers with their roses?!), hollyhocks, leopard’s bane (the picture shows elecampane, or Inula to use its botanical name), morning glory, mint and, most bizarrely, creeping Jenny, with the idea that these plants attract diseases to roses.

Rose diseases primarily occur when plants don’t get enough light and airflow. Wild roses are real fighters, used to battling it out with other plants to hold their space, but when they’re brought into the close environment of a garden, packed in with other plants and, dare I say it, also overfed they can become susceptible to mildews, rusts and spotting.

As indeed can the plants on the list in the article for pretty much the same reason. These plants aren’t attracting diseases to the roses, just developing the same problems for the same reasons. Furthermore they don’t suddenly not suffer from diseases if no roses are growing nearby.

Wait… What?

Sometimes you see something that makes you scratch your head for a moment.

Mint stops pollinators visiting roses?

Now I can’t speak for American bees but British bees seem rather partial to mint. I know there’s this idea, supported by but not quite comprehensively proven by science, that aromatic plants ward off pests. Mint is an absolute icon of the aromatic plants!

Aromatic plants need to be pollinated too. In the same way that carnivorous plants don’t eat their pollinators, any aromatic plant that repelled its pollinators would fail to produce seed. Mint is no exception.

Definitely Not Just Martha

This is absolutely not just a phenomenon particular to the Martha Stewart website.

To illustrate I visited the website ‘Devon Live’, a regional news website for my part of the UK. The word ‘news’ is often a little stretched in the case of this website.

As with roses, yes you can get fungal problems on lavender foliage. You might well say that this means that foliage should remain dry at all times.

But what happens when it rains? Are we to rush out with umbrellas every time the clouds linger over our gardens?

Lavender can be difficult in nurseries; tightly packed plants with regular irrigation and the stress of being in pots can be susceptible to diseases. If gardeners had the same problems that nurseries have with lavender crops they would probably avoid growing the plant altogether.

Lazy Journalism, Fear-mongering And Misinformation

In the ‘age of information’ you’d really hope that people would do some fact checking. Or maybe just apply a bit of logic?

I guess part of the problem is that there’s so much information that it’s hard to know what to trust. The internet, the primary source of easy facts, is so awash with junk content, and one publication just lifts content of the next, then the next, fuelling an exponential growth in poor quality content.

Very little is actually being written by people with specifically horticultural backgrounds, beyond maybe supplying a soundbite for someone’s article. Maybe editors don’t want to get dirty fingerprints onto the keyboards of the newsroom computers?

There’s also a pattern to a lot of this mainstream gardening media. “You have a serious problem you didn’t even know about, but don’t worry here’s an easy solution that will make everything right again.” That is until you read the next article that tells you that you have a different serious problem that needs fixing.

‘Clickbait’ is a key tool for online media; apparently nobody wants to read articles telling them that they’re actually doing pretty well at life. We must be bullied and cajoled into thinking that we’re all miserable failures, but all will be OK if we defer to this publication or that one for a remedy.

Outright misinformation takes ‘clickbait’ to the next level, cutting at the rope of reality to the point where only single strands might remain. Social media is awash with people telling you that you can make useful fertiliser with banana skins, grow citrus trees from pips that will fruit in 12 months, and my own favourite where someone grafts a mango tree to other mango tree and gets a bumper crop of shiny red apples. A small number of people might question the validity of the content but as long as the majority go along with what they’re told then it’s fine.

Who Cares?

I derive enormous satisfaction from seeing people succeed with their gardens, regardless of whether or not I’ve had a personal hand in their success.

I believe in the importance of gardening, not as a chore to be tackled using a series of hacks but as a creative and contemplative process we can all enjoy. I believe, absolutely, that to write about gardening for other people is an honour and a privilege, and a role to take responsibly.

Bad information, deliberate or not, is unhelpful for gardeners. I’ve been gardening long enough now that I’ve learned to spot things that aren’t right, but new gardeners are faced with a barrage of information and expected to pick out the bits that are actually true from the half-truths and fakes. It’s hard enough getting started in gardening without misinformation.

Fear-mongering doesn’t help. Keeping gardeners in a constant state of angst in order to generate clicks seems right for some media publications, but not for me.

I’m just glad I made my way into gardening with the support of kind and rational people; not everyone gets that option.

Six Top Tips To Make Your Garden Thrive

1. Plants thrive and plants die, and they have a bewildering range of habits in between. A yellow leaf here and there is usually a plant dropping an old leaf it doesn’t want. There is no point trying to ‘cure’ perfectly normal plant behaviour.

2. Pests and diseases have good years and bad. If you’re getting the same problems every year then it might be worth exploring alternative plants for your garden. Bear in mind that young and soft growth is usually far more susceptible to problems that tougher growth, so go easy on your feeding.

3. Treat all gardening wisdom as advice rather than instructions. Your garden is unique, thanks to soil, microclimate, history (what’s happened on your site in the past), plant selections and a wealth of other things. Giving die-hard absolutes about your garden would be like trying to ask a monkey to measure the moon.

4. Don’t berate yourself for any problems, and don’t let yourself get into the habit of thinking every imperfection is a disaster. One of the gardeners I admire the most was a lady I overheard over 10 years ago who, after a rough start to her sweet peas, had pulled them up. “This year just wasn’t meant to be,” she told her friend, “but I’ll try again next year.”

5. If a particular type of plant or a particular gardening job becomes too much hassle, look for ways to avoid growing that plant or doing that job.

6. Always, always, ask questions. Anyone who truly knows what they’re doing will usually be more than happy to share their insight, while those who are just regurgitating the same few facts over and over really won’t want to help you. Cake and cookies are a friendly way to get an audience with a knowledgeable gardener!