More Sceptical Gardening

For longer than he cares to remember, biologist and horticultural expert Ken Thompson has been contemplating the armour-plated persistence of long-discredited gardening ‘advice’: regularly turn your compost heap, grow nettles for wildlife, add some bonemeal and compost to the hole when planting a tree or shrub, don’t water plants in bright sunlight to avoid scorching the leaves, and so on. All of it, he suspects, is designed to make it look like the so-called experts have privileged access to a store of secret knowledge denied to us mere mortals, but which in reality just makes gardening more expensive, complicated and difficult than it really is. Most of this information feels like it’s been around forever, but new myths burst out of the woodwork with remarkable regularity: does growing your own veg really have a carbon footprint the size of a small planet?

More Sceptical Gardening is one final attempt by the author to set the record straight. Also, by way of light relief, he includes a selection of other topics that have caught his attention, from the identity of lettuce seeds to just how Spanish are Spanish bluebells? All these are linked by nothing other than a very tenuous connection to the marvellous, joyous thing we call gardening.