Made with Xara © Garden Cottage Nursery, 2011 Approaches to Coastal Gardening On and Off the West Coast of the British Isles Having a garden on the West Coast provides both obstacles & opportunities, the often poor shallow peat soil & incessant wind restrict growth but the tempering effect on the atmosphere of the warm(ish) waters of the Atlantic allow us to grow hundreds of exotic plants that couldn’t survive the colder winters inland or on the East Coast beside the colder waters of the North Sea. In this section we provide a short guide in how to go about getting the most from your patch. Coastal Windbreaks & Hedges If you live by the sea the wind plays a major part in your life, if you are a plant by the sea the buffeting salt air will play a defining role in your growth or lack of it. By erecting a living buffer to the wind we can grow much much more & the growth rate of everything increases greatly. In this section we help show you how to plan & plant a large scale windbreak or hedge to make your own green paradise from a slat blasted hillside. Making a Border The classic building block of the garden is a Herbaceous or Mixed Border. Preparing it in the best possible way will ensure that it puts on the best display.     Rabbits & your Garden For many people their gardening efforts are repeatedly frustrated by the attention of ravenous hordes of rabbits. With a few alterations & some careful planning the Lagomorphic tide can be turned. The tastes of Rabbits are quite similar to those of other browsers such as deer, so though the fences need to be higher they dislike similar plants Encouraging Wildlife Into Your Garden The whole reasoning behind gardening is to make our immediate natural environment more pleasant to us, why not make it more so to other creatures too.  Here we give some simple do’s & don’ts we should all follow.     Plants & Their Insect Pollinators To ensure fertilisation the majority of garden plants attempt to attract insects to their flowers, different plants target different types of insect & have many novel techniques. Here we discuss a bit of how & why they do it. Gondwanan Plants What Are They & Why Grow Them in Britain? The crust of the Earth is made of a series of rocky plates that float on top of the hot liquid mantle these plates are continually colliding & spreading causing earthquakes near these plate boundaries. Over millions of years this drift causes the continents to re-shape & shift relative positions. When flowering plants first evolved Southern Africa, India, South America, Antarctica, Australia & New Zealand were all bunched up into a super continent known as Gondwana It’s legacy is still evident today in many plants & animals. Click here for the concise edition.     Plant Taxonomy Humans like naming things, it helps keep them tidy & organised in our heads & it eases communication if we can all agree on a name for a thing. With plants there are rules to make sure everyone around the world names things in the same way & to reduce confusion. Here we try to explain a bit of how & why this is done. Recommended Reading There are thousands of horticultural book titles available, here are a few we find ourselves returning to time & again.     Top 5 Plants With hundreds of plants to chose from it can be hard to know what to use in what situation so here we list 5 proven performers for a variety of garden conditions.