gardening

1. 1
   noununcountable

   The activity of cultivating soil and caring for plants, especially in a garden.

   Gardening can be both relaxing and surprisingly hard physical work.

   She turned her love of gardening into a small landscaping business.

   Similarhorticulture, cultivation

   Note

   Built plainly from garden plus -ing, the word names an activity rather than a place, and it is usually uncountable: you do some gardening, not a gardening. The plural does exist, as in Elizabeth Gaskell's Wives and Daughters, which lists "gardenings" among a summer's pastimes. James Rennie in 1833 called it "a sort of refined farming upon a limited scale", a fair way to tell it from agriculture.

2. 2
   verb

   Present participle of garden.

   He was gardening when the storm rolled in.

   She enjoys gardening on quiet Sunday mornings.

   Note

   The verb behind it is intransitive: people garden, but they do not garden a lawn. So the participle stands alone after be, as in had been gardening all day. As a gerund it shades into the noun for the hobby. The same form also covers a batsman tapping the pitch and, in slang, smoking marijuana, so context decides which gardening is meant.

3. 3
   noununcountable

   The ongoing care, maintenance, or curation of something, especially digital content such as files, wikis, or collections.

   Much like a garden left untended grows wild, a neglected wiki slowly fills with errors and clutter.

   The wiki stays useful only through constant gardening by its volunteers.

   Gardening of a large music library involves fixing tags and removing duplicates.

   Similarcuration, maintenance, upkeep

   Oppositeneglect

   Note

   The image of tending plants carried over to anything that needs steady upkeep. It usually comes with a word naming the plot: wiki gardening, digital gardening. Mark S. Choate's Professional Wikis (2008) treats wiki gardening as chores like finding uncategorized pages. Tanya Basu in 2020 sets digital gardening against old-school blogging, and the metaphor runs through the phrase: one cultivates a digital garden.

4. 4
   noununcountable

   In cricket, a batsman's prodding or tapping of the pitch with the bat, usually to flatten bumps in the surface.

   The opener paused for some gardening after a delivery kicked up off a crack.

   His constant gardening between deliveries clearly frustrated the bowler.

   Note

   Cricket borrowed the gardener's motion for the batsman's own patch of ground, with the bat used like a hand tool to press down what a delivery has disturbed. As a noun it is usually uncountable, so a batsman pauses for some gardening or a bit of gardening. The action also has a verb of its own, found behind the participle form.

5. 5
   nounslanghistoricaluncountable

   The dropping of naval mines into water from an aircraft flying at low altitude.

   Bomber crews carried out gardening along the shipping lanes under cover of darkness.

   Months of gardening steadily disrupted enemy convoys in the channel.

   Similarminelaying

   Note

   RAF slang, now historical, that treats minelaying as planting: mines are sown like seeds, so dropping them from low altitude became gardening, borrowed straight from the ordinary tending of a garden. Like that sense it is usually uncountable, so crews went gardening rather than carrying out a gardening. Keep it to writing about RAF operations, and gloss it on first use, since a modern reader will otherwise picture flowerbeds.

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